boatswain.
A person aboard ship who is in charge of various maritime affairs.
Meaning & usage
A person aboard ship who is in charge of various maritime affairs. The officer (or warrant officer) in charge of sails, rigging, anchors, cables etc. and all work on deck of a sailing ship.
A person aboard ship who is in charge of various maritime affairs. The petty officer of a merchant ship who controls the work of other seamen.
A kind of gull, the jaeger.
The tropicbird.
Where this word comes from
From Middle English botswain, botswein, bote-swayn, from late Old English bātsweġen, from bāt (“boat”) + sweġen (“swain”), the latter element a borrowing from Old Norse sveinn (“boy”); equivalent to boat + swain (“boy, servant”).
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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.
Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.