Word.ws English Dictionary

tidewaiter

tidewaiter is the alternative form of tide waiter.

Meaning of tide waiter

Noun

tide waiter (plural tide waiters)

  1. (UK, historical) A customs inspector at a seaport who oversees the landing of goods from merchant vessels in order to secure payment of duties.
    • "Your morning letters, if I remember right, were from a fish-monger and a tide-waiter."1892, Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
  2. A person who watches public opinion before declaring their own.

Forms of tidewaiter

pluraltidewaiters

Questions about tidewaiter

What is tidewaiter the alternative form of?
Tidewaiter is the alternative form of tide waiter.

Words near tidewaiter in the dictionary

  1. tidesmen
  2. tidesurveyor
  3. tidesurveyors
  4. Tideswell
  5. Tideswells
  6. tidewaiter
  7. tidewaiters
  8. tidewaitership
  9. tidewaiterships
  10. tidewater
  11. tidewaters

Source and license

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