Lifeboat

How to spell lifeboat

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce lifeboat

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does lifeboat mean?

1. nounA small boat kept ready to rescue people in danger at sea, or carried aboard a larger vessel for use in an emergency.

Lifeboat in a sentence

• The crew lowered the lifeboat as the storm grew worse.

• A volunteer lifeboat launched from the harbour to reach the stranded sailors.

Where does lifeboat come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a transparent English compound, formed by joining two native words: 'life', which comes from the Old English 'lif', meaning existence or living, and 'boat', from the Old English 'bat', a small open vessel. Both elements have deep Germanic roots, and the pairing was coined in English itself rather than borrowed from another tongue. The compound appears from the late 1700s, exactly the period when organised sea rescue began to develop along British and other coasts. The sense is wonderfully literal: a boat designed to save lives, whether kept aboard a ship or stationed at a rescue station. Because both halves are ordinary, familiar words, the spelling holds no real surprises beyond remembering it is written as a single solid word.

How the word is built

• life (existence)
• boat (vessel)