Word.ws English Dictionary

tally on

tally on verb: to man a rope for hauling, the sailors standing in a line (also called a tail).

Verb

tally on (third-person singular simple present tallies on, present participle tallying on, simple past and past participle tallied on)

  1. (archaic) To man a rope for hauling, the sailors standing in a line (also called a tail)
    • Our watch haul out the fore, and lay aloft and put two reefs into it, and reef the foresail, and race with the starboard watch, to see which will mast-head its topsail first. All hands tally-on to the main tack, and while some are furling the jib, and hoisting the staysail, we mizen-topmen...1840, R[ichard] H[enry] D[ana], Jr., Two Years before the Mast. […] (Harper’s Family Library; no. CVI), New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers […], →OCLC
    • “Now then — to the main topsail now! Tally on to that gantline. Don't stand about there!”1897, Joseph Conrad, The Children of the Sea: A Tale of the Forecastle, New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, →OCLC
  2. To dovetail together.

Forms of tally on

third-person singular presenttallies on
present participletallying on
past participletallied on
pasttallied on

Questions about tally on

What does tally on mean?
Tally on means to man a rope for hauling, the sailors standing in a line (also called a tail).
What part of speech is tally on?
Tally on is a verb.
What is the past tense of tally on?
The past tense of tally on is tallied on.

Words near tally on in the dictionary

  1. tally hoing
  2. tally hos
  3. tally light
  4. tally mark
  5. tally marks
  6. tally on
  7. tally room
  8. tally rooms
  9. tally shop
  10. tally shops
  11. tally stick

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: tally on (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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