Boat
nounA small or medium vessel used for travelling on water.
How to spell boat
4 letters · 1 syllable
How to pronounce boat
What does boat mean?
- nounA small or medium vessel used for travelling on water.
Boat in a sentence
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They rented a small boat for the afternoon on the lake.
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The fishing boat returned to the harbour before the storm.
Where does boat come from?
Language of origin: Germanic
The word comes from the Old English bat, meaning a small open vessel for travelling on water. It belongs to the Germanic family of seafaring words and is related to similar terms in the Scandinavian languages, reflecting centuries of shared coastal and trading life around the North Sea. The spelling settled with the 'oa' vowel by the late medieval period, a pattern English often uses to spell a long 'o' sound, as in 'coat' and 'road'. Because the same nautical vocabulary spread widely, English later lent 'boat' to many other languages alongside related words such as 'bateau' in French, which itself was borrowed from the same Germanic source. The straightforward 'oa' spelling is the only mild trap, since the word is otherwise short and phonetic.
How the word is built
- boat (from Old English bat: a small vessel); single root, no affixes
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