seaman
noun
a person skilled in seamanship.
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seaman
1 American
[see-muhn]
/ ˈsi mən /
noun
-
seamen
plural
-
a person skilled in seamanship.
-
a person whose trade or occupation is assisting in the handling, sailing, and navigating of a ship during a voyage, especially one below the rank of officer; sailor.
-
U.S. Navy and Coast Guard. an enlisted person ranking below petty officer.
Seaman
2
American
[see-muhn]
/ ˈsi mən /
noun
seaman
British
/ ˈsiːmən /
noun
-
a rating trained in seamanship as opposed to electrical engineering, etc
-
a man who serves as a sailor
-
a person skilled in seamanship
Synonym Usage
See sailor.
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Nouns
Etymology
Origin of seaman
First recorded before 900; Middle English seeman, Old English sǣmann. See sea, man
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
Shelley was a seaman gunner on the destroyer HMS Milne on D-Day and guarded troops going ashore during the Normandy landings in June 1944.
From BBC ● Mar. 31, 2026
"We don't have enough water on board right now. We got food a few days back," said one Indian seaman stuck in a small refuelling boat off Iraq, within sight of the Iranian shore.
From Barron's ● Mar. 20, 2026
All told, 89 merchant vessels and more than 2,700 Allied seaman perished in the Arctic.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jan. 2, 2026
In 1985, as the Year of the Pacific approached, the ship’s captain was Peter Willcox, a lifelong seaman and conscientious objector from Vietnam who’d devoted his career to environmental action on the oceans.
From Slate ● Jul. 22, 2025
The master cursed and shouted that he would not: “A wizard aboard, and I the best seaman of the Trade, and this the handiest ship I ever sailed—turn back?”
From "A Wizard of Earthsea" by Ursula K. Le Guin
In 1945, MI5 opened a letter Hobsbawm wrote to his first wife, Muriel Seaman.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 14, 2026
Former Arsenal duo Lee Dixon and David Seaman were part of a formidable backline for the Gunners during the 1990s and early 2000s - and both also featured for England.
From BBC ● Apr. 10, 2026
By the end of October, Seaman had a pretty good idea of how Kimwolf was sneaking onto Ipidea’s networks.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Apr. 3, 2026
That giant botnet, called Kimwolf, is the most powerful ever assembled, said Chad Seaman, a security researcher at the networking company Akamai.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jan. 28, 2026
“Today Seaman Caden’s diving bell shall be put to the test, and the manner of our descent shall be once and for all determined.”
From "Challenger Deep" by Neal Shusterman
But the FAA expressly excludes from arbitration “contracts of employment of seamen, railroad employees, or any other class of workers engaged in foreign or interstate commerce.”
From Slate ● Jun. 3, 2026
The Journal spoke to more than a dozen seamen held in the gulf, who described deteriorating conditions tipping into a humanitarian crisis.
From The Wall Street Journal ● May 9, 2026
But like many seamen, he says he needed the work.
From BBC ● Feb. 10, 2026
The researchers have estimated that the proportion of lung cancers related to onboard asbestos exposure were of the order of 27 per cent in Australian seamen and 12 per cent in British seamen.
From Science Daily ● Nov. 14, 2023
She thinks of the wild old seamen who lived in this town, smugglers and pirates, sailing over the dark seas, winding their ships between ten thousand reefs.
From "All the Light We Cannot See" by Anthony Doerr
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
