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ENGLISH · A WORD WITH POSSIBILITIES

pontoon.

A flat-bottomed boat or other floating structure used as a buoyant support for a temporary bridge, dock or landing stage.

7 characters2 syllables approx.English language

Meaning & usage

noun/pɒnˈtuːn/
  1. A flat-bottomed boat or other floating structure used as a buoyant support for a temporary bridge, dock or landing stage.

  2. A bridge with floating supports.

    broadly
  3. A box used to raise a sunken vessel.

  4. A float of a seaplane.

  5. A lighter or barge used for loading or unloading ships.

Where this word comes from

Borrowed from Middle French ponton, from Old French ponton, from Latin pontō, pontōnem (“ferryboat”), from pōns (“bridge”).

noun/pɒnˈtuːn/
  1. A card game in which the object is to obtain cards whose value adds up to, or nearly to, 21 but not exceed it.

    uncountable
  2. A two-card hand totalling 21 in this game.

    countable
Where this word comes from

Probably from vingt-un, an obsolete variant of vingt-et-un (“twenty-one”), from French.

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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.