Word.ws English Dictionary

steamboats

steamboats adjective: drunk; intoxicated. Also the plural of steamboat.

Adjective

steamboats (not comparable)

  1. (Ireland, UK, slang) Drunk; intoxicated.
    • Joe and The Tongue especially are absolutely steamboats by the time we reach the Niccy, and the 'bouncers' – furtive damp chemistry teachers on an ego trip – turn us all sneeringly away in their clean-spitting accents:2006, Kevin MacNeil, The Stornoway Way, Penguin UK, →ISBN
    • Somebody absolutely steamboats he says on
      sweet warm wine
      swigged plaincover from a paper bag
      squats in a puddle with nothing to sell […]2010, MacCaig Morgan Lochhead, Three Scottish Poets, Canongate Books, →ISBN, page 96

Also used as

steamboats is also the plural of steamboat.

Examples of steamboats in a sentence

  • The truth is that nobody remembered; they had all been absolutely steamboats.2011, D. D. Johnston, Peace, Love and Petrol Bombs, AK Press, →ISBN, page 57:
  • After getting steamboats in the pub we would all head to the local fish-and-chip shop, where I would order a fish supper and a steak pie wrapped together.2011, Colin MacFarlane, No Mean Glasgow: Revelations of a Gorbals Guy, Random House, →ISBN:
  • By the weekend we were off it and out on the lash, living it up in the VIP section of Annabelle's nightclub and getting absolutely steamboats.2016, Jules Coll, Flabyrinth: A Journey from Losing Nine Stone to Finding Myself, Gill & Macmillan Ltd, →ISBN:

Origin of steamboats

Perhaps from Steamboat Willie, rhyming slang for silly, or perhaps from a stereotype of steamboat passengers getting drunk.

Questions about steamboats

What does steamboats mean?
Steamboats means drunk; intoxicated.
How do you use steamboats in a sentence?
The truth is that nobody remembered; they had all been absolutely steamboats.
What part of speech is steamboats?
Steamboats is an adjective.

Words near steamboats in the dictionary

  1. steamboaters
  2. steamboating
  3. steamboatings
  4. steamboatman
  5. steamboatmen
  6. steamboats
  7. steamcar
  8. steamcars
  9. steamchest
  10. steamchests
  11. steamed

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: steamboats (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.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-steamboats.wav.

Cite this entry: “steamboats.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/steamboats. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.