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starboard

nounverbnouncommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈstɑː.bəd//
  • Canada//ˈstɑɹ.bɚd//
  • Australia//ˈstaː.bəd//

The righthand side of a ship, boat or aircraft when facing the front, or fore or bow. Used to unambiguously refer to directions according to the sides of the vessel, rather than those of a crew member or object.

noun

  1. 1

    The righthand side of a ship, boat or aircraft when facing the front, or fore or bow. Used to unambiguously refer to directions according to the sides of the vessel, rather than those of a crew member or object.

    I see another vessel off the starboard side.

    We're on starboard tack, so the other boat has to give way.

    Now stow the mainsail as follows, preferably with the sail still lying in the starboard cockpit: beginning at the head, fold the upper section so that the upper two battens are aligned together; then tightly roll the sail from the head down to the foot. Reinsert the sail into its bag.

  2. 2

    One of the two traditional watches aboard a ship standing a watch in two.

Etymology

From Middle English sterbord, stere-bourd, stere-burd, from Old English stēorbord, from Proto-West Germanic *steurubord, equivalent to steer + board (“side (of a ship)”), referring to ancient ships with the steering oar set to the right (to accommodate right-handed crew). Ships had to dock on their left (port) side because the steering oar on the right would get in the way, which is how the left became known as the port side.

verb

  1. 1

    To put to the right, or starboard, side of a vessel.

    to starboard the helm

noun

  1. 1

    A list that shows messages starred in a community space.

    The unlimited starring power is an arguably useful feature because it enables management of the starboard with notifications and the like, but I see nothing in the informal job description of a room owner that says they have any more right to spam the room than I do.

    TFHRC#1 indicates a backquote in a chat message using fixed-width formatting, which is (correctly) output literally. FHRC#2 shows that the same backquote is misinterpreted by the sidebar starboard as a formatting character, wrecking the intended look and feel even more.

    i also use carlbot for warnings, bans, mutes—and my starboard!!

  2. 2

    figurativeA system that enables such a list.

    In case you don't know what a starboard is, it's basically a system used on Discord that whenever you react with a star emoji, the message is showcased inside of a #starboard channel.

    We used to do that until someone suggested adding a bot that had a starboard.

    You could use a form of starboard to put messages into a read only channel, but then anyone with react permissions could theoretically add to it

Etymology

From star + board. The earliest known use was in 2013 on Meta Stack Exchange.

Forms

plural
starboards
past tense
starboarded
past participle
starboarded
present participle
starboarding
third person singular
starboards
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).