Word.ws English Dictionary

gibstaff

gibstaff noun: a staff to gauge water, or to push a boat.

Noun

gibstaff (plural gibstaffs)

  1. (obsolete) A staff to gauge water, or to push a boat.
    • The house boats of the Mohannas are called “Doondees“. One family may live in the same small boat for as long as half a century. These “Doondees“ range in size between 6 m long and 2 m wide up to a length of 14 m and a width of 4 m in the middle of the boat. The boat is basically steered by a...1987, G. Mustafa Shar, “The Mohanna — An Unknown Life on the Indus River”, in Reports on Field Work Carried out at Mohenjo-Daro: Interim Reports, volume 2 (1983–84), →ISSN, page 173
  2. (historical, obsolete) A staff used in stick fighting; a quarterstaff.

Forms of gibstaff

pluralgibstaffs

Origin of gibstaff

From the dialectal term gib (“hooked stick”) + staff.

Questions about gibstaff

What does gibstaff mean?
Gibstaff means a staff to gauge water, or to push a boat.
What part of speech is gibstaff?
Gibstaff is a noun.
What is the plural of gibstaff?
The plural of gibstaff is gibstaffs.

Words near gibstaff in the dictionary

  1. Gibsonburg
  2. Gibsonesque
  3. Gibsonia
  4. Gibsonian
  5. Gibsons
  6. gibstaff
  7. gibstaffs
  8. gibun
  9. gibus
  10. gibuses
  11. GIC

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: gibstaff (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: “gibstaff.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/gibstaff. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.