Word.ws English Dictionary

catboat

catboat noun: a sailing boat with a single sail, usually rigged on a gaff spar, used for fishing in New England and later adapted for racing and cruising. It has a single mast set near to the bow and a long boom which may extend over the stern.

Noun

catboat (plural catboats)

  1. A sailing boat with a single sail, usually rigged on a gaff spar, used for fishing in New England and later adapted for racing and cruising. It has a single mast set near to the bow and a long boom which may extend over the stern.
    • Men that I knew around Wapatomac didn't wear high, shiny plug hats, nor yeller spring overcoats, nor carry canes with ivory heads as big as a catboat's anchor, as you might say.1913, Joseph C[rosby] Lincoln, chapter X, in Mr. Pratt’s Patients, New York, N.Y.; London: D[aniel] Appleton and Company, →OCLC
    Synonyms:
    Una boat

Synonyms of catboat

Forms of catboat

pluralcatboats

Origin of catboat

According to Watkins, the first element is related to the animal cat and has correlations in Dutch kat (“vessel with wide fore and aft”), Medieval Latin gatus, gattus, Old French chat, a war machine or portable shed for protecting sapping operations, or a boat with such a shed, and Middle French chat (“kind of commercial vessel”). However, it could instead derive from Irish cot, coit; see cot (sense 3).

Words formed from catboat

Questions about catboat

What does catboat mean?
Catboat means a sailing boat with a single sail, usually rigged on a gaff spar, used for fishing in New England and later adapted for racing and cruising. It has a single mast set near to the bow and a long boom which may extend over the stern.
What part of speech is catboat?
Catboat is a noun.
What is the plural of catboat?
The plural of catboat is catboats.

Words near catboat in the dictionary

  1. catbird grapes
  2. catbird seat
  3. catbird seats
  4. catbirds
  5. catblogging
  6. catboat
  7. catboater
  8. catboaters
  9. catboats
  10. catbox
  11. catboxes

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: catboat (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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