Word.ws English Dictionary

round to

round to verb: to turn the head of a ship toward the wind, especially in order to drop speed.

Verb

round to (third-person singular simple present rounds to, present participle rounding to, simple past and past participle rounded to)

  1. (dated, intransitive) To turn the head of a ship toward the wind, especially in order to drop speed.
    • In less than an hour she was close to the reef, where she rounded to, and backed her topsails in order to survey the coast.1857, R. M. Ballantyne, The Coral Island
    • 1899', Henry Billings Brown, The New York
      she received a signal of two blasts from the steamer Burlington, which, with four barges in tow, had gone down the Canadian side of the river, and was then rounding to at the coal dock on the American side, exhibiting her masthead and green lights to the...
    Synonyms:
    come to, head up

Synonyms of round to

Forms of round to

third-person singular presentrounds to
present participlerounding to
past participlerounded to
pastrounded to

Questions about round to

What does round to mean?
Round to means to turn the head of a ship toward the wind, especially in order to drop speed.
What part of speech is round to?
Round to is a verb.
What is the past tense of round to?
The past tense of round to is rounded to.

Words near round to in the dictionary

  1. round the clock
  2. round the corner
  3. round the Horn
  4. round the twist
  5. round the wicket
  6. round to
  7. round top
  8. round tops
  9. round trip
  10. round trips
  11. round tuit

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: round to (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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