Other forms: boats
A boat is a small vessel that floats and carries people across water. A rowing boat, get in the boat, the boat sank.
The rough rule at sea is that a ship can carry a boat and a boat cannot carry a ship — though submarines are always called boats, for historical reasons. Boat race, boatyard and lifeboat are standard. Note in the same boat, meaning in the same difficulty; miss the boat, meaning to lose your chance; and rock the boat, meaning to disturb a settled arrangement.
1nounboatA small vessel that floats and carries people.
“We rowed a little boat across the lake.”
boat is a small vessel.
Old English bat comes from a Germanic root meaning something split or hollowed — the same idea as ship, and probably the same dugout log. Boatswain, pronounced bosun, is boat plus swain, a servant.
Proto-Indo-European
*bʰeyd-
Middle English
bot
English, today
boat
Built from
From Middle English bot. From Middle English bot, boot, boet, boyt (“boat”), from Old English bāt (“boat”), from Proto-West Germanic bait, from Proto-Germanic baitaz, baitą (“boat, small ship”), from Proto-Indo-European bʰeyd- (“to break, split”) (whence also fissure via Latin). Cognate with Old Norse beit (“boat”), Middle Dutch beitel (“little boat”). Old Norse bátr (whence Faroese and Icelandic bátur, Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk and Swedish båt, Danish båd), Dutch boot, German Boot, Occitan batèl and French bateau are all ultimately borrowings from the Old English word.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA