Word.ws English Dictionary

the boat

the boat proper noun: in US history and genealogy, a nickname for Mayflower, the ship on which the Pilgrims sailed from England to Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1620.

Proper noun (1)

the boat

  1. (informal) In US history and genealogy, a nickname for Mayflower, the ship on which the Pilgrims sailed from England to Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1620.
    • Angela Davis, longtime revolutionary and former member of the Communist Party, was stunned to learn that she, of all people, could trace her ancestry back to the boat.
    • Bit by bit, she learned the stories of her ancestors and of Cape Cod. And it occurred to her: “These people,” she said, “probably went all the way back to The Boat.”2020, Josephine de la Bruyere, “The Duality of Being a Mayflower Descendant”, in The Provincetown Independent

Proper noun (2) capitalized: the Boat

the Boat

  1. Alternative letter-case form of the boat (“Mayflower”).

Forms of the boat

alternative formthe Boat

Questions about the boat

What does the boat mean?
The boat means in US history and genealogy, a nickname for Mayflower, the ship on which the Pilgrims sailed from England to Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1620.
What part of speech is the boat?
The boat is a proper noun.

Words near the boat in the dictionary

  1. the bigs
  2. the bill, please
  3. the birds and the bees
  4. the biter bit
  5. the blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice
  6. the boat
  7. the bogs
  8. the bomb
  9. the bomb diggity
  10. the bomb diggy
  11. the bombs

Source and license

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