Word.ws English Dictionary

on the beach

on the beach prepositional phrase: removed or retired from an active shipboard position in the navy or merchant navy.

Prepositional phrase

  1. (idiomatic) Removed or retired from an active shipboard position in the navy or merchant navy.
    • Ericson had been axed from the navy in 1927, after ten years’ service: he had been on the beach for two hard years[.]1951, Nicholas Monsarrat, chapter 1, in The Cruel Sea, London: Cassell
    • [O]fficers received only half pay when not on active service. Even Horatio Nelson spent five years “on the beach”[.]2023, Evan Wilson, The Horrible Peace: British Veterans and the End of the Napoleonic Wars, University of Massachusetts Press

Questions about on the beach

What does on the beach mean?
On the beach means removed or retired from an active shipboard position in the navy or merchant navy.
What part of speech is on the beach?
On the beach is a prepositional phrase.

Words near on the beach in the dictionary

  1. on the back of
  2. on the ball
  3. on the bash
  4. on the basis of
  5. on the batter
  6. on the beach
  7. on the beat
  8. on the bench
  9. on the bias
  10. on the blanket
  11. on the blink

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: on the beach (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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