Word.ws English Dictionary

on deck

on deck prepositional phrase: on the deck of a ship, especially of a captain or officer; in charge.

Prepositional phrase

  1. On the deck of a ship, especially of a captain or officer; in charge.
    • In every sense of the expression he is ‘on deck’; but my Jim, for the most part, skulked down below as though he had been a stowaway.1899 September – 1900 July, Joseph Conrad, chapter XIX, in Lord Jim: A Tale, Edinburgh; London: William Blackwood and Sons, published 1900, →OCLC, page 213
  2. Being the batter who will be up next, typically when that player is waiting on the field.
    • Jones is the on-deck batter.

Questions about on deck

What does on deck mean?
On deck means on the deck of a ship, especially of a captain or officer; in charge.
What part of speech is on deck?
On deck is a prepositional phrase.

Words near on deck in the dictionary

  1. on course
  2. on credit
  3. on cue
  4. on dead dogs
  5. on death's doorstep
  6. on deck
  7. on deck circle
  8. on deck circles
  9. on demand
  10. on display
  11. on dit

Source and license

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