Word.ws English Dictionary

stearsman

stearsman is the obsolete form of steersman.

Meaning of steersman

Noun

steersman (plural steersmen)

  1. One who steers a ship or other vessel; the helmsman.
    • And as for a tiller, the whale-boat never admits of any such effeminacy; and therefore as in gamming a complete boat’s crew must leave the ship, and hence as the boat steerer or harpooneer is of the number, that subordinate is the steersman upon the occasion, and the captain, having no place to sit...1851 November 14, Herman Melville, chapter 53, in Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, 1st American edition, New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers; London: Richard Bentley, →OCLC
    Synonyms:
    helmsman, sternsman

Forms of stearsman

pluralstearsmen

Questions about stearsman

What is stearsman the obsolete form of?
Stearsman is the obsolete form of steersman.

Words near stearsman in the dictionary

  1. stearoyl
  2. stearoylated
  3. stearoyls
  4. stearrhea
  5. stears
  6. stearsman
  7. stearsmen
  8. stearyl
  9. stearylamine
  10. stearyls
  11. steatite

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: stearsman (page history and authors); steersman (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: “stearsman.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/stearsman. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.