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aboard

adverbprepositioncommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//əˈbɔːd//
  • United States//əˈbɔɹd//

On board; into or within a ship or boat; hence, into or within a railway car.

adverb

  1. 1

    On board; into or within a ship or boat; hence, into or within a railway car.

    We all climbed aboard.

    As the 1857 to Manchester Piccadilly rolls in, I scan the windows and realise there are plenty of spare seats, so I hop aboard. The train is a '221'+'220' combo to allow for social distancing - a luxury on an XC train as normally you're playing sardines, so I make the most of it.

    Trump said he signed the executive orders while aboard Air Force One on a return flight to Washington from Florida.

  2. 2

    On or onto a horse, a camel, etc.

    to sling a saddle aboard

  3. 3

    On base.

    He doubled with two men aboard, scoring them both.

  4. 4

    Into a team, group, or company.

    The office manager welcomed him aboard.

  5. 5

    Alongside.

    The ships came close aboard to pass messages.

    The captain laid his ship aboard the enemy's ship.

Etymology

From Middle English abord, from a- (“on”) + bord (“board, side of a ship”); equivalent to a- + board.

preposition

  1. 1

    On board of; onto or into a ship, boat, train, plane.

    We all went aboard the ship.

    Conditions were horrendous aboard most British naval vessels at the time. Scurvy and other diseases ran rampant, killing more seamen each year than all other causes combined, including combat.

  2. 2

    Onto a horse.

  3. 3

    obsoleteAcross; athwart; alongside.

    Nor iron bands aboard The Pontic Sea by their huge navy cast.

The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).