whaleboat
whaleboat noun: a long narrow rowing boat, formerly used in whaling, which is pointed at both ends so that it can move either forwards or backwards equally well.
Noun
whaleboat (plural whaleboats)
- A long narrow rowing boat, formerly used in whaling, which is pointed at both ends so that it can move either forwards or backwards equally well.
- Before we had gone fifty yards we perceived that all hopes of getting further up the stream in the whale-boat were at an end, for not two hundred yards above where we had stopped were a succession of shallows and mudbanks, with not six inches of water over them.1886 October – 1887 January, H[enry] Rider Haggard, She: A History of Adventure, London: Longmans, Green, and Co., published 1887, →OCLC
- A boat resembling this and carried on a warship or other ship.
Forms of whaleboat
| plural | whaleboats |
|---|
Origin of whaleboat
From whale + boat.
Words formed from whaleboat
Questions about whaleboat
- What does whaleboat mean?
- Whaleboat means a long narrow rowing boat, formerly used in whaling, which is pointed at both ends so that it can move either forwards or backwards equally well.
- What part of speech is whaleboat?
- Whaleboat is a noun.
- What is the plural of whaleboat?
- The plural of whaleboat is whaleboats.
Words near whaleboat in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: whaleboat (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-whaleboat.wav.
Cite this entry: “whaleboat.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/whaleboat. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.