Word.ws English Dictionary

cast adrift

cast adrift verb: to abandon a ship at sea.

Verb

cast adrift (third-person singular simple present casts adrift, present participle casting adrift, simple past and past participle cast adrift)

  1. (transitive) To abandon a ship at sea
    • We cast adrift the burning sloop to await its fate.
  2. (transitive) To place a person in a ship's boat or raft and leave them
    • Captain Bligh and some loyal crewmen were cast adrift in the middle of the Pacific.

Forms of cast adrift

third-person singular presentcasts adrift
present participlecasting adrift
past participlecast adrift
pastcast adrift

Questions about cast adrift

What does cast adrift mean?
Cast adrift means to abandon a ship at sea.
What part of speech is cast adrift?
Cast adrift is a verb.
What is the past tense of cast adrift?
The past tense of cast adrift is cast adrift.

Words near cast adrift in the dictionary

  1. cast a chill
  2. cast a pall
  3. cast a shadow
  4. cast about
  5. cast accounts
  6. cast adrift
  7. cast anchor
  8. cast around
  9. cast aside
  10. cast aspersions
  11. cast away

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: cast adrift (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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