Word.ws English Dictionary

swiftboat

swiftboat noun: a type of gunboat used by the United States military on inland waterways.

Noun

swiftboat (plural swiftboats)

  1. (US) A type of gunboat used by the United States military on inland waterways.
    • The men narrowly missed death when the swiftboat in front of theirs took a direct hit from a Communist rocket-propelled grenade.1973, Glenn MacDonald, Report or distort?, page 116
    • Kilgore represents one of Willard's guides into the heart of darkness. The swiftboat captain represents another.1999, WLA: War, Literature & the Arts, page 289
  2. (attributive, figuratively, usually) A smear campaign based on specious claims.
    • Lately, however, Republican swiftboat attacks have begun to fall short.2007, Jeffrey Feldman, Framing the Debate, →ISBN
    • So I saw this swiftboat TV attack on Jefferson.2008, JB Azneer, D R Spice, Opposition Research: Stealing The White House, →ISBN

Verb

swiftboat (third-person singular simple present swiftboats, present participle swiftboating, simple past and past participle swiftboated)

  1. (US, derogatory, transitive) To attack a politician with specious claims.
    • No one should have been surprised that the Republicans would try to swiftboat Hillary in 2016, turning an accomplished diplomat into a feckless bungler who lied to cover up her own failures.2015, David Brock, Killing the Messenger, →ISBN
  2. (broadly) To smear; to attack someone or something's reputation using slander, misrepresentation, or false accusations.
    • The Borgia family has had such a bad reputation over all these hundreds of years. Some of it is merited, and for some of it, they were swiftboated. The cardinals hired writers to write bad things about them.2013 January 7, Sam Thielman, “The Man From Oz Finds Religion”, in Adweek
    • My wife suggested that in absence of a response by Woody, he was being swiftboated.2014 January 27, Robert B. Weide, “The Woody Allen Allegations: Not So Fast”, in Daily Beast

Examples of swiftboat in a sentence

  • We felt like Athenian sailors waiting for Persian triremes to blunder into the straits of Messina, but we were probably more like Vietcong irregulars waiting to ambush American swiftboat captains.2006, William Sargent, Writing Naturally: A Memoir, →ISBN, page 5:
  • When I was serving on a swiftboat in Vietnam, my crewmates and I had a dog we called VC.2008, Scott Swett, Tim Ziegler, To set the record straight:
  • The Swiftboat strategy aims at hitting the target at his/her perceived area of strength, to discredit and degrade what would have been a political advantage.2011, Laura Westra, Klaus Bosselman, Colin Soskolne, Globalisation and Ecological Integrity in Science and International Law, →ISBN:
  • Morano went on to become the pit bull of the climate change denial movement, launching swiftboat-like attacks as before, but this time directed against climate science and climate scientists.2013, Michael E. Mann, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines, →ISBN:

Forms of swiftboat

Noun
pluralswiftboats
alternative formswift boat
alternative formswift-boat
Verb
third-person singular presentswiftboats
present participleswiftboating
past participleswiftboated
pastswiftboated

Origin of swiftboat

Uncertain: Possibly, swift + boat, or possibly based on an acronym for Shallow Water Inshore Fast Tactical Craft. The use as a political term derives from a smear campaign against John Kerry when Texas tycoon Robert J. Perry hired several Navy swiftboat veterans to form the group Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, which questioned the legitimacy of Kerry's status as a war hero.

Questions about swiftboat

What does swiftboat mean?
Swiftboat means a type of gunboat used by the United States military on inland waterways.
How do you use swiftboat in a sentence?
We felt like Athenian sailors waiting for Persian triremes to blunder into the straits of Messina, but we were probably more like Vietcong irregulars waiting to ambush American swiftboat captains.
What part of speech is swiftboat?
Swiftboat can be a noun or a verb.
What is the plural of swiftboat?
The plural of swiftboat is swiftboats.

Words near swiftboat in the dictionary

  1. swift-footedness
  2. swift-handed
  3. swift-handedness
  4. swift-thinking
  5. Swift-Tuttle
  6. swiftboat
  7. swiftboated
  8. swiftboating
  9. swiftboats
  10. Swiftdom
  11. swiften

Source and license

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