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PlainSpell

hovercraft

UK /ˈhɒv.ə.kɹɑːft/noun

hovercraft is a noun meaning “A vehicle supported on a cushion of air, able to traverse many different types of terrain and travel over water, used for transport” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). It is spelled H-O-V-E-R-C-R-A-F-T and has 3 syllables, and it appears about once in every 3 million words in written English (wordfreq, 2021 data).

What does hovercraft mean?

noun

  1. 1

    A vehicle supported on a cushion of air, able to traverse many different types of terrain and travel over water, used for transport.

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

How do you pronounce hovercraft?

  • UK /ˈhɒv.ə.kɹɑːft/
  • UK /ˈhɒv.ə.kɹæft/
  • UK /ˈhʌv.ə.kɹɑːft/

Hovercraft has 3 syllables (counted from its American pronunciation in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary).

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Recordings: LL-Q1860_(eng)-Vealhurl-hovercraft.wav, Wikimedia Commons (author and licence on each file's page).

How common is hovercraft?

Hovercraft appears about once in every 3 million words in written English, the 50,539th most frequent word form in the list.

Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).

Hovercraft in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese

In the sense vehicle supported on a cushion of air:

LanguageWords
Frenchaéroglisseur
GermanHovercraft, Luftkissenfahrzeug, Luftkissenboot
Portugueseaerobarco, aerodeslizador, hovercraft
Spanishaerodeslizador, hovercraft (hóverkraft)

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Translations are Wiktionary's, by sense; a linked word has its own PlainSpell page.

Where does hovercraft come from?

From hover + -craft. Originally a trademark by Saunders-Roe Limited, a British aero- and marine-engineering company.

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).