Word.ws English Dictionary

fly-boat

fly-boat is the alternative form of flyboat.

Meaning of flyboat

Noun

flyboat (plural flyboats)

  1. (historical) A large flat-bottomed coasting vessel, formerly found in Holland, Spain and Portugal.
    • August 14, 1595, Thomas Treffry, letter to Sir Robert Cecil
      a ship of Bristol was chased into this harbour by two Spanish fly-boats, and they report […] that there are five men of war, Spanish, in the road of Conquet
  2. (Ireland, UK, historical) A kind of (often horse-drawn) passenger boat formerly used on canals. Faster than other types of canal boats at the time, the horses would run along the towpath

Forms of fly-boat

pluralfly-boats

Questions about fly-boat

What is fly-boat the alternative form of?
Fly-boat is the alternative form of flyboat.

Words near fly-boat in the dictionary

  1. fly-away
  2. fly-back
  3. fly-backs
  4. fly-bitten
  5. fly-blown
  6. fly-boat
  7. fly-boats
  8. fly-bombed
  9. fly-bottle
  10. fly-bottles
  11. fly-box

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: fly-boat (page history and authors); flyboat (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: “fly-boat.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/fly-boat. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.