Word.ws English Dictionary

portmaster

portmaster noun: an official in charge of running a port.

Noun

portmaster (plural portmasters)

  1. An official in charge of running a port.
    • No one on the streets from dusk to dawn. Marcus had seen a fisherman at the piers shouting that the catch would be gone before he was on the water. The new Antean portmaster had him whipped in the street until there were bright tracks of raw meat along the chitined back.2013, Daniel Abraham, The Tyrant’s Law (The Dagger and the Coin; book three), Orbit, →ISBN, page 317
    • A call came in from a red-faced man in uniform, the portmaster, who ranted about the tactic. “His Majesty requires you leave your ship!” figured in the list.2014, C. J. Cherryh [pen name; Carolyn Janice Cherry], “Dancing on the Edge of the Dark”, in Greg Bear, Gardner Dozois, editors, Multiverse: Exploring Poul Anderson’s Worlds, Baen Books, published...

Examples of portmaster in a sentence

  • They’ll ask the portmasters if they’ve seen the rowing boat.2016, Peter F. Hamilton, A Night Without Stars: A Novel of the Commonwealth, New York, N.Y.: Del Rey, →ISBN, page 232:
  • A dumpy portmaster and his servant peeked their heads out of the door, eyes wide.2017, John Hornor Jacobs, Infernal Machines, London: Gollancz, →ISBN, page 80:

Forms of portmaster

pluralportmasters

Origin of portmaster

From port + master.

Questions about portmaster

What does portmaster mean?
Portmaster means an official in charge of running a port.
How do you use portmaster in a sentence?
They’ll ask the portmasters if they’ve seen the rowing boat.
What part of speech is portmaster?
Portmaster is a noun.
What is the plural of portmaster?
The plural of portmaster is portmasters.

Words near portmaster in the dictionary

  1. portmantua
  2. portmantuas
  3. portmapper
  4. portmappers
  5. Portmarnock
  6. portmaster
  7. portmasters
  8. Portmeirion
  9. portmen
  10. portmoot
  11. portmoots

Source and license

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