larboard means the left side of a ship, looking from the stern forward to the bow; port side. It carries an Arena rating of 1404, earned across 221 head-to-head judged battles.
Among words judged in Lexicurio's Arena, larboard ranks #615 of 17,142 for Most Ingenious Words, #1,160 of 17,143 for Best Fossil-Poetry Words, #2,495 of 17,127 for Most Vivid Words, #4,033 of 17,149 for Most Exacting Words.
larboard is pronounced /ˈlɑːbɔːd/.
Why “larboard” is a great word
LARBOARD — [Noun] The left side of a ship when facing forward, an archaic term superseded by 'port'. From Middle English ladde-borde, lateborde (literally 'loading side', from lade 'to load' + bord 'side of a ship'), altered in the 16th century to larboard by association with starboard. Unlike port—a modern, phonetically distinct command—or starboard—an immutable term of function—larboard is the discarded, perilous counterpart, a word damned by its own sound. It is the shouted order lost to the wind, the helmsman's moment of fatal hesitation, and the ghost in maritime nomenclature—a word sacrificed to the pragmatic need for a world where left and right, in the dark and the gale, must never sound the same.
Etymology
From Middle English ladde-bord, latebord, most likely referring to the side of the ship on which cargo was loaded. Changed to larboard in the 1500s by association with starboard. (Texts from the 1500s have spellings like lerbord, leereboord, larboord, corresponding to how they spell sterbord, steereboord, starboord.)
noun
- The left side of a ship, looking from the stern forward to the bow; port side.e.g.“[…] harder beset
And more endangered than when Argo passed
Through Bosporus betwixt the justling rocks,
Or when Ulysses on the larboard shunned
Charybdis, and by th’ other whirlpool steered.” — 1674, John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book 2:
Definitions & examples from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 3.0).
Words closest in meaning
By meaning, not spelling — each word's AI semantic fingerprint, nearest first.