Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun One who is employed in the loading or unloading of ships.
  • transitive & intransitive verb To load or unload the cargo of (a ship) or to engage in the process of loading or unloading such a vessel.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun One whose occupation is the stowage of goods, packages, etc., in a ship's hold; one who loads or unloads vessels.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun One whose occupation is to load and unload vessels in port; one who stows a cargo in a hold.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun A dockworker involved in loading and unloading cargo.
  • verb transitive To load or unload a ship's cargo.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun a laborer who loads and unloads vessels in a port

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Spanish estibador, from estibar, to stow, from Latin stīpāre, to pack.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Spanish estibador (Portuguese estivador), form of estibar ("to load"), from Latin stīpāre (Italian stipare), present active infinitive of stīpō ("stuff"), from Proto-Indo-European *stīpos, from root Proto-Indo-European *steip-. Cognate to stiff via Proto-Indo-European.

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Examples

Comments

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  • I'm always mistakenly thinking it refers to a large machine, like a tractor. Lovely word, though.

    February 20, 2007

  • My dad's name is Steve. This word reminds me of his neverending lectures.

    February 20, 2007

  • That's awesome, uselessness.

    I use this word rather frequently: "I curse like a stevedore." I have had to stop saying it because people stare at me, I suspect because they don't know what it means rather than the admission that I use bad words. It's akin to "curse like a sailor," "curse like a longshoreman." One person even got offended. Not that I swear, but that I said stevedore. Weird.

    February 21, 2007

  • funny how some people will get offended even not knowing a term. I remember when I was little my Dad got pissed at me and my sister for saying jinx.

    February 21, 2007

  • Funny, AZ! Well, maybe you said jinx juuuust so, making it sound all dirty-like. ;-)

    Actually, I say "curse like a longshoreman" fairly often too, mostly because I like the word longshoreman and not because I curse a lot, or even know whether said longshoremen do. How often am I around them, after all? Or stevedores, for that matter.

    February 21, 2007