Word.ws English Dictionary

boatload

UK/ˈbəʊtˌləʊd/US/ˈboʊtˌloʊd/

boatload noun: cargo or passengers that fill a boat.

boatload: cargo or passengers that fill a boat
Image: Faizul Latif Chowdhury, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

boatload (plural boatloads)

  1. Cargo or passengers that fill a boat.
    • a boatload of ferry passengers
    • Just then two boats[-]load of natives appeared, and our owner having agreed with them to tow us into harbour, they tried to do so, assisted by our own boat, but could make no way. […] Those who live on the coast have plenty of fish; but when inland, as we are here, they only go to the sea...1869, Alfred Russel Wallace, The Malay Archipelago: The Land of the Orang-utan, and the Bird of Paradise. A Narrative of Travel, with Studies of Man and Nature., volume II, London: Macmillan and Co....
    Synonyms:
    boatful
  2. (slang) A large quantity.
    • He showed up an hour later with a whole boatload of hamburgers, chips, cookies, and assorted other munchies, not to mention sodas and beer, and we all fell in and stuffed ourselves silly.
    • What's a fair price to pay for video perfection, or even something that looks a lot like it? In the case of high-definition movie discs, the answer may not just be "a boatload of money," but having to keep two incompatible players under the TV set.2006 December 10, Rob Pegoraro, “Waiting for the Winner of a High-Definition High Noon”, in The Washington Post

Synonyms of boatload

30 more synonymsFewer synonyms

All synonyms of boatload

Forms of boatload

pluralboatloads

Origin of boatload

From boat + load. The figurative sense is extended from the literal sense.

Questions about boatload

What does boatload mean?
Boatload means cargo or passengers that fill a boat.
What part of speech is boatload?
Boatload is a noun.
How do you pronounce boatload?
Boatload is pronounced /ˈbəʊtˌləʊd/ (UK).
What is the plural of boatload?
The plural of boatload is boatloads.

Words near boatload in the dictionary

  1. boatlifted
  2. boatlifting
  3. boatlifts
  4. boatlike
  5. boatlip
  6. boatload
  7. boatloads
  8. boatmaker
  9. boatmakers
  10. boatmaking
  11. boatman

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: boatload (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-au-boatload.ogg.

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