whaleboat
"whaleboat" is a 9-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“whaleboat” is uncommon English (outside the top frequency list), classed as a noun. The kind of spelling people second-guess.
- Unranked
- below top-frequency English
- 9
- letters
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - A long narrow rowing boat, formerly used in whaling, which is pointed at both ends so that it can move either forwards or backwards equally well.
Corpus desk
Index EN-whaleboat · whaleboat · English
whaleboat · unranked · 0 variants · 0 confusables
- FREQ-UNRANKED Unranked
- LEN-LONG 9 letters
- VOW-4 4 vowels
- CONFUS-0 No pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-THIN "W" thin
- PHOTO-UNK Peer pending
Read with this headword: Spelling guide for this pattern
Desk codes from Wiktionary headword shape, FrequencyWords rank tier, confusable-pair count, generated misspelling depth, letter-cohort book size, and photo-finish peer. Not a difficulty grade.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | whaleboat |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| Letters | 9 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Long-tail rank of “whaleboat” in English
Rare enough to double-check
whaleboat is uncommon English outside the top frequency list, classed as anoun. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. 2 senses are on record.
whaleboat doesn't appear in our generated misspelling index, suggesting the orthography follows predictable English patterns. It is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, a sign it's visually distinctive enough not to be mixed up with another word.
Etymologically, the entry records: From whale + boat. The correct English form is whaleboat, spelled W-H-A-L-E-B-O-A-T.
Definition
- 1A long narrow rowing boat, formerly used in whaling, which is pointed at both ends so that it can move either forwards or backwards equally well.
- 2A boat resembling this and carried on a warship or other ship.
Recorded use
Wiktionary exampleThese source excerpts show how whaleboat appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
Before we had gone fifty yards we perceived that all hopes of getting further up the stream in the whale-boat were at an end, for not two hundred yards above where we had stopped were a succession of shallows and mudbanks, with not six inches of water over them.
Etymology
From whale + boat.
Definitions, pronunciation, and etymology for this entry are drawn from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org structured extract (CC BY-SA). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.