Word.ws English Dictionary

deckhand

US/ˈdɛkˌhænd/

deckhand noun: a member of the crew of a merchant ship who performs manual labour.

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

Verb

deckhand (third-person singular simple present deckhands, present participle deckhanding, simple past and past participle deckhanded)

  1. (intransitive) To work on a boat as a deckhand; crew.
    • You deckhand for Old Sam in the summer, you guide climbers up the Big Bump in the spring, you can skin a Cat, mine for gold, butcher a moose, fix an engine.1999, Dana Stabenow, Hunter's Moon, →ISBN
    • I deckhanded on a fish boat for four years and knew no fisherman likes to be called out of the blue and have his numbers demanded!2004, Stephen Hume, A Stain Upon the Sea: West Coast Salmon Farming, →ISBN, page 210

Examples of deckhand in a sentence

  • Years later, I met a guy who had deckhanded on her after I did, and he was a little more equivocal.2011, Bruce Burrows, The River Killers, →ISBN, page 16:
  • Larry ran a tugboat company from there, and sometimes my brother and I deckhanded for him.2017, Claire Dederer, Love and Trouble: Memoirs of a Former Wild Girl, →ISBN:

Forms of deckhand

Noun
pluraldeckhands
Verb
third-person singular presentdeckhands
present participledeckhanding
past participledeckhanded
pastdeckhanded

Origin of deckhand

From deck + hand.

Questions about deckhand

What does deckhand mean?
Deckhand means a member of the crew of a merchant ship who performs manual labour.
How do you use deckhand in a sentence?
Years later, I met a guy who had deckhanded on her after I did, and he was a little more equivocal.
What part of speech is deckhand?
Deckhand can be a noun or a verb.
How do you pronounce deckhand?
Deckhand is pronounced /ˈdɛkˌhænd/ (US).
What is the plural of deckhand?
The plural of deckhand is deckhands.

Words near deckhand in the dictionary

  1. deckers
  2. deckest
  3. decketh
  4. deckful
  5. deckfuls
  6. deckhand
  7. deckhanded
  8. deckhanding
  9. deckhands
  10. deckhead
  11. deckheads

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: 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.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-deckhand.wav.

Cite this entry: “deckhand.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/deckhand. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.