Word.ws English Dictionary

deck hand

deck hand is the alternative form of deckhand.

Meaning of deckhand

Noun

deckhand (plural deckhands)

  1. A member of the crew of a merchant ship who performs manual labour.
    • But I wasn't good medicine for myself after I left them, he admitted, remembering the dreary years of failure at farming and trading, as blacksmith and deck hand and bullwhacker.1952, Dorothy M. Johnson, The Unbeliever; in Indian Country, London: Corgi, 1961, page 33
  2. A stagehand.
    • Sometimes actors set props on the spikes, or sometimes a deckhand will do it, depending on the action of the play.2020, John Ramsey Holloway, Zachary Stribling, Illustrated Theatre Production Guide, page 15

See all 3 meanings of deckhand

Forms of deck hand

pluraldeck hands

Questions about deck hand

What is deck hand the alternative form of?
Deck hand is the alternative form of deckhand.

Words near deck hand in the dictionary

  1. deck chair
  2. deck chairs
  3. deck floor
  4. deck floors
  5. deck grip
  6. deck hand
  7. deck hands
  8. deck hook
  9. deck hooks
  10. deck of cards
  11. deck out

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: deck hand (page history and authors); deckhand (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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Cite this entry: “deck hand.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/deck_hand. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.