raft
1 Americannoun
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a more or less rigid floating platform made of buoyant material or materials.
an inflatable rubber raft.
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a collection of logs, planks, casks, etc., fastened together for floating on water.
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Building Trades. a slab of reinforced concrete providing a footing on yielding soil, usually for a whole building, so that the weight of the soil that would be displaced by the settlement of the building exceeds the weight of the building itself; mat.
verb (used with object)
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rafts,
present (3rd person singular)
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rafted,
past participle, past
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rafting
present participle
-
to transport on a raft.
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to form (logs or the like) into a raft.
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to travel or cross by raft.
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(of an ice floe) to transport (embedded organic or rock debris) from the shore out to sea.
verb (used without object)
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rafts,
present (3rd person singular)
-
rafted,
past participle, past
-
rafting
present participle
-
to use a raft; go or travel on a raft.
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(of an ice floe) to overlap another ice floe.
noun
noun
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a buoyant platform of logs, planks, etc, used as a vessel or moored platform
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a thick slab of reinforced concrete laid over soft ground to provide a foundation for a building
verb
noun
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Participles
Conjugated Forms
Present
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raftsimple
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raftssimple
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have raftedperfect
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has raftedperfect
-
am raftingprogressive
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are raftingprogressive
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is raftingprogressive
-
have been raftingperfect progressive
-
has been raftingperfect progressive
Past
-
raftedsimple
-
had raftedperfect
-
was raftingprogressive
-
were raftingprogressive
-
had been raftingperfect progressive
Future
Etymology
Origin of raft1
First recorded in 1300–50; Middle English raft(e), “(wooden) beam, spear,” from Old Norse raptr rafter 1
Origin of raft2
An Americanism dating back to 1825–35; variant of raff
Explanation
A raft is a vessel or structure that's made to float on water. You might have an inflatable raft you use for floating around your backyard pool. Rafts come in many forms, from soft and squishy to wooden and permanent, like the rafts built on lakes for swimmers to rest on and dive off. Other rafts are mobile — they're small, flat boats meant for transporting people or goods across a river, for example. If you raft, you travel by raft. Experts guess that raft comes from the Old Norse word raptr, "log."
Vocabulary lists containing raft
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:
European stock indexes rose at the open, extending a raft of record highs, with the Stoxx 600 index up and industrial and retail stocks gaining.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 6, 2026
Each of these viruses comes with a raft of symptoms ranging from unpleasant to, in some cases, fatal—fever, headache, muscle and joint pain, shock, organ failure.
From Slate ● Aug. 4, 2026
They’re looking for photos and videos of the child on a raft or boat with other children, and witnesses who could have seen the child before she was pulled from the water.
From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 3, 2026
Iraola did make a raft of changes at the break and in the second half but that is no excuse for the way they capitulated against Daniel Farke's side.
From BBC ● Aug. 2, 2026
It didn’t make the raft go much faster, but Alex felt better doing something.
From "Nim’s Island" by Wendy Orr
AFP images showed residents using rafts and inflated boats to reach higher ground with the help of the state's disaster response officials.
From Barron's ● Aug. 5, 2026
“He’s landing rockets on robot drone rafts in the ocean, and you’re saying he doesn’t know what he’s doing,” Ellison rebuffed critics at the time.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 13, 2026
No, the truly strange thing — still remarkable to experience among thousands — is the way their fame is grounded in epic rafts of sci-fi nerdiness.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jun. 8, 2026
Brothers to the Rescue, a Cuban exile group that searched for rafts carrying migrants from Cuba to the US, had previously dropped anti-Castro leaflets near the Cuban coast.
From BBC ● May 16, 2026
He taught Mona and Callie to float too; all three of them bobbed out there like rafts, together.
From "Typical American" by Gish Jen
However, our drilling efforts recovered the first cores of this material after it has spent tens of millions of years being rafted across the seafloor as Earth's tectonic plates spread apart.
From Science Daily ● Dec. 11, 2025
Ann Willis, California regional director for the environmentalist group American Rivers, said that when she’s rafted on the Klamath previously, the water downstream of the dams has been warm, green and smelly.
From Los Angeles Times ● Mar. 24, 2024
In Wyoming, the Thomases fished, rafted on the Snake River and sat by a campfire overlooking the Teton Range with the other couples.
From Salon ● Aug. 10, 2023
Pamina was operating “without sufficient competent crew,” states a Feb. 23 filing by Seattle resident Nicholas Leede, whose 39-foot sailboat suffered $62,117 in damage while rafted in the back row.
From Seattle Times ● May 28, 2023
“NOTES: “Today I rafted out into the deep pools of the creek to fish.
From "My Side of the Mountain" by Jean Craighead George
Activities "such as skydiving, white-water rafting, roller coasters or other amusement rides" would "fall short of the standard".
From BBC ● Jul. 24, 2026
The theme park’s latest project is a more than $50 million indoor thrill coaster with white-water rafting.
From The Wall Street Journal ● May 30, 2026
Marczak said he had begun the film almost by accident, when he and his wife were rafting down the river thinking about a fiction project when they ran into trouble.
From Barron's ● Jan. 24, 2026
A British woman has died on a white-water rafting excursion in the French Alps.
From BBC ● Jul. 20, 2025
When I was finally allowed to read it, I very well knew this was no simple tale of rafting down a river but the everlasting story of America itself, with all our glory and shame.
From "October Sky" by Homer Hickam
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.
