Why do ships use “port” and “starboard” instead of “left” and “right?” | Hacker News Reader

Why do ships use “port” and “starboard” instead of “left” and “right?”

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659 pointssnitzr617 comments

It's interesting to compare how different professions handle the ambiguity in left/right. In the maritime world they went with an approach at one extreme, where they just use two completely separate words, "port" and "starboard." (Though that's far from the only case where there's a special word for something on a boat.)

At the other extreme you have the medical profession where the first thing you learn in medical school is that left/right always refer to the patient's perspective. You could imagine that the maritime world could have gone with a similar convention. But the downside is that on very rare occasions someone along the way gets confused and the doctor operates on the wrong side of the body.

The theatrical world takes an intermediate approach, where they use the terms "stage left / stage right", which always refer to the perspective of an actor onstage facing the audience. Then the word "stage" tells you the perspective, but you still keep the words left/right so you don't have to memorize two completely separate words.

I suppose it has to do with how many frames of reference you're juggling in a task/profession. With boats, others mentioned that wind provides its own frame, and there are separate words still for "left" and "right" in that frame.

Then there's space, where it gets even more fun, as the relevant frames - the ship, the orbit (or the "centre of gravity" of everything pulling on you) - are completely independent. That is, your orientation doesn't matter for the travel direction. Now, not only "right" and "left" are ambiguous - but also "up", "down", "forward" and "backward".

When in orbit, you have "prograde" and "retrograde" to refer to the velocity vector's direction and its opposite; if we dub that "forward" and "backward", then "radial" and "antiradial" are "down" and "up" (i.e. towards / away from the center of orbited body), and then "normal", "antinormal" for "left" and "right", which you can get from the cross product of "forward" and "up".

> With boats, others mentioned that wind provides its own frame, and there are separate words still for "left" and "right" in that frame.

There's windward (towards/upwind) and leeward (away/downwind).

Are there left and right too?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windward_and_leeward

The convention for orbital spacecraft is that the local coordinate system has +z facing whatever it is orbiting and +x facing travel direction. Then you can refer to directions relative to the spacecraft such as "+x", "-y", etc.

The space shuttle normally orbited with it's payload bay, opposite of the landing gear facing Earth. The payload bay was +z direction. From the layperson's point of view, the shuttle orbited upside down, but from an aerospace engineer's point of view it orbited right side up and landed upside down.

As I suspected from seeing your username over the years, you really are knowledgeable on the topic of temporal space and orientation :)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_temporal_space

I’m curious, have you ever played Kerbal Space Program? Or, are you familiar with orbital mechanics for a different reason? KSP taught me about those terms and familiarized me with the concept.

Interesting: once you nail down any two axises, the third follows.

> At the other extreme you have the medical profession where the first thing you learn in medical school is that left/right always refer to the patient's perspective.

I was recently involved in a case where a patient decided that their left should be called the right side during a phone consultation as that would help their doctor.

Good times.

I have heard stories of patients, entirely on their own, using black markers to indicate which leg/arm was to be operated upon. Surgeons are entirely OK with this. They appreciate it. I also heard a legend of a patient who themselves marked the wrong leg. This wasn't discovered until after sedation. The procedure was canceled until everything was clarified.

When having my arm x-rayed years ago they places a small pad with an embedded metal "L" to indicate that it was my left arm. But if you place the L backwards, then they will think the image has been reversed, which just makes everything more complicated. So the L-pad needed "this side up" label.

That's a particularly strange kind of overthinking, implicitly acknowledging the medical field is complex enough to consult a professional, and yet thinking something as common and (relatively) simple as interpreting left/right from patient descriptions hasn't already been considered.

That's before even getting into the assumption of face to face orientation over a phone... is that in virtual terms, or in terms of absolute orientation, I hope they took into consideration the curvature of the Earth.

Is this the story of how someone ended up with one less appendix than they should have?

> Though that's far from the only case where there's a special word for something on a boat.

Understatement of the week... pretty much everything on a boat has a different word for it. Often for practical reasons, sometimes purely traditional reasons. It is nice because it binds one to nautical tradition leading back centuries/millenia.

One interesting thing about middle ages technologies, like boats, is that the words in the different romance languages for things invented in this era are very different from each other. For example, in Spanish boat words like port and starboard are totally different[1]. Other examples of middle ages words that are very different: windmill = molino, wheelbarrow = carretilla.

Words that refer to older things have more latin roots and are thus similar. Very newly created words also are similar because of all the english loan words. E.g computer= la computadora.

[1] https://www.spanish.academy/blog/the-ultimate-guide-to-nauti...

This reminds me of the design of aircraft cockpits. Controls are deliberately designed to look and feel different so they cannot be easily confused (in itself a lesson for UI/UX design) - something which has caused aviation incidents in aircraft which have had consistently designed controls.

It's also pretty cool that a ton of sailing vocabulary has made its way into common English vernacular. I guess with the UK being the most powerful country in the world at one time (and projecting their power via their Navy) it's not too surprising.

*Cough cough* rum, sodomy, and the lash *cough cough*

Your medical comment reminded me of the fascinating constellation of terminology used to identify locations and orientations in anatomy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatomical_terms_of_location

Some of the terms: dorsal/ventral, proximal/distal, anterior/posterior, superior/inferior, oral/aboral, basal/apical

When you're describing something like a microbe, the terms get fairly arbitrary; which is the "head" end of some little blobby thing?

And dentists talking about tooth faces have buccal (cheek-side), lingual (tongue side), occlusal (chewing surface), mesial (side closest to center), and distal (the other side from mesial).

the thing that's tricky is basal/apical can be different directions: i.e. the base of the lung is at the bottom, the base of the left ventricle (in the heart) at the top. You have to know the shape of the organ to know. There's also cranial/caudal, axial/coronal/sagittal just off the top of my head

In the skiing and mountaineering world we use climbers (sometimes “lookers”) right/left or skiers right/left to differentiate when facing uphill or downhill. I find having both is helpful instead of just having a single standardized one.

For example, if you are standing and looking at a mountain, it’s easier to say “just to the climbers left of that peak” because it’s on the left from your perspective, likewise when descending it best to say “stay to the skiers left of the rock”.

There’s also lots of times it’s good to mix and match, like if you are looking at and discussing a mountain from afar and planning on skiing down it later, you might keep the conversation from a skiers perspective.

And in general hiking, referring to streams and rivers one may follow or cross, there are the "true left" and "true right" banks of the stream. Meaning, left or right looking the way the water is flowing: downstream.

In French, starboard and port are "tribord" (same etymology as "starboard", through Dutch) and "bâbord" ("back (of the oarman) board").

On stage, they are "côté cour" and "côté jardin" because the "Comédie-Française" theatre during the 1770 was in the Tuileries palace, and the stage was oriented with the Louvre courtyard on its right, and the Tuileries garden on its left.

In German it’s Steuerbord (meaning the same as starboard) and Backbord (compare Middle Low German ba(c)kbōrt and Dutch bakboort; oldest mention of this form is from old English: bæcbord!)

The word ‘back’ in German meaning ‘back’ in English doesn’t even exist. Only in this one loanword from Low German.

Only today I looked up this word, I never knew or understood that Backbord is literally backboard.

In English, there's an archaic "larboard" meaning "port side". My understanding is that this word was intentionally banished due to confusion originating from the sound being so similar to "starboard".

> because the "Comédie-Française" theatre during the 1770 was in the Tuileries palace, and the stage was oriented with the Louvre courtyard on its right, and the Tuileries garden on its left

That is the most french explanation possible.

> At the other extreme you have the medical profession where the first thing you learn in medical school is that left/right always refer to the patient's perspective

In (musical) theatre we do it the other way around. The we call it "stage left" and "stage right" or "SL and SR" since we use abbreviations everywhere in our notes. It's always from the "stage manager's perspective" which is traditionally (but not always) facing the audience.

If the stage manager is facing a different way that doesn't affect the meaning of left/right.

It's from their perspective because they are basically the only person who isn't running around like a chook with their head cut off (because their eyes are glued to the script and video screens - https://youtu.be/DP2QOmN57iU?t=82).

In the automotive trade, a vehicle has a "driver's side" and "passenger side". This only partly solves the ambiguity, because of course some countries drive on the left.

For stage directions there's also "House Left" and "House Right", which are from the perspective of the audience.

There's also the approach taken in some Australian native languages, e.g. [1], where they use absolute directions instead of relative directions, so they would call what we call the port side of a boat the north side if the boat was heading east, and call it the west side if the boat was heading north.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuuk_Thaayorre_language

There's a few other languages that do this (as the primary version. Most languages mix)[0]. In fact there's 3 main classes:

- relative: in relation to the viewer (e.g. The mouse is to my right)

- absolute: using some coordinate system, such as cardinal (e.g. Plant is on the North side of the room)

- intrinsic: relative, but with respect to another object and not the viewer (e.g. the TV is on top of the TV stand which is opposite of the door)

It is worth mentioning that this is overly simplified and that there is a lot more nuance to all this.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_and_spatial_cognition

Ask a farmer for directions. In my experience it's more likely they will tell you to turn north/south/east/west than left or right.

Surely they don't have built-in compasses, so what would they do in an unfamiliar location on an overcast day?

The German theatre world developed the opposite convention, “Bühne links” (literally "stage left”) means left from the perspective of the audience.

I don’t know so much about the theatre world, I’m a professional dancer, but at least the dance scene is increasingly international, switching fluently between English or German depending on the people present; some people learned the English/international convention, some - especially older - directors know mainly the German convention, some people are not aware that there are different conventions in English and German and the result is complete chaos.

If you're inside a ship, it's often hard to say what way around you are: "left" and "right" have utility for the perspective of a person onboard. Port and starboard are the onboard equivalent of North/South/East/West when walking on land, especially if you're inside a building with no windows for external reference.

This is unlike for a doctor, where it's obvious which side is which: you can see the patient.

> This is unlike for a doctor, where it's obvious which side is which: you can see the patient.

This isn’t always true and it’s not always obvious.

For example with imaging - axial slices of the patient through symmetrical structures. The brain, lower abdo, a single leg or arm etc, etc. There are conventions in image display for a reason - it is not obvious.

For axial slices, as an observer, you are positioned as though at the foot of the patient’s bed. Your right is the patients left.

It just seems like an old convention that has stuck, seem'm much simpler to anyone not familiar with ships to say 'ships left' or 'ships right' than to have new words. We don't do this with cars. You have a left rear door, not a port rear door.

> you can see the patient.

Often not true. In any sort of imaging it can be ambiguous what way the patient is facing

Yup. Port and starboard, along with forward and aft are in reference to the center-line of the ship from the perspective of being aft and looking forward. Looking at a top down of the ship from where forward and the forecastle are up, it is left (port) and right (starboard).

In french theatre has specific words for left and right. Côté cour et Côté jardin. Courtside and garden side.

In geography left and right banks of a river are always in the direction of the flow

In one of Tim Snyders Yale lectures on Ukrainian history, goes overboard about the left bank/right bank in respect of the Dniepro. The river runs north to south, so the right bank is basically the west. I strongly suspect he has trouble telling his left from his right; I've read an essay in which there is a map with a small patch of Russia (coloured red) in the bottom-left, but the caption says it's bottom-right.

I suspect the reason he made a meal of this subject (and the reason he insists on using the left/right terminology) is because he finds it challenging.

I learned it with the Seine, in Paris: the left bank is to the south of the right bank. It's also where the bulk of the 1968 political protest happened; the protestors were leftists. The Seine generally flows south to north, emptying into the English Channel.

Rail uses “up” and “down main” where up is in the direction of the port or main terminus.

> In geography left and right banks of a river are always in the direction of the flow

Isn't there some river where the flow goes either way depending on tide? I'm thinking it might be in Alaska, but there might be more than one.

Which makes for some very confusing situations when the river is twisty. There are different places in New Orleans where the West Bank is south of you, west of you, and east of you.

When kayaking, I'd have referred to the banks as "river left" and "river right" to mean the same thing.

In medicine there is one obviously very important perspective, and in theatre two. But mariners still need words for relative left and right directions all around them, like "the preferred channel is to the left of the buoy" (the channel and the buoy don't have port or starboard sides, and it wouldn't be useful to communicate about their relative angle as seen by the boat's crew).

>like "the preferred channel is to the left of the buoy"

While this is true, we (at least in England) would normally say "leave the buoy to starboard" (though when racing we'd call it a 'mark' rather than a buoy). Perhaps it's habit, I'm not sure, but it's generally unambiguous.

> the channel and the buoy don't have port or starboard sides

In the context of a channel, the buoys (marks) are coded port and starboard, coloured red and green, and shaped like a can or a cone respectively.

When navigating a channel into harbour, the port marks are left to the port of the ship, and the starboard marks to starboard.

> stage left / stage right

Outdoor recreation often uses climbers left/right and skiers left/right (even when there's no rock or snow) to orient direction relative to slope, which is similarly descriptive and clear to those who haven't heard the terms before.

Except for rivers, where True Left and True Right are commonly used in New Zealand for hiking and kayaking, and I can never remember which way round they go!

I hear skiers left/right or looker's left/right often. Usually looker's is said while on the lift or the base of the mountain.

Climber’s right doesn’t make sense to me as distinguished from looker’s right, since both perform the named activity facing the slope.

And sometimes you get Prompt Side and Opposite Prompt, which are _usually_ stage left and stage right respectively, but it depends on the theatre, with some having the prompt on the stage right.

Some other persepctives:

"Skier's left/right" for snow skiing. Ambiguity arises when looking uphill or downhill.

When riding on a float in Mardi Gras in New Orleans. You might be on the "driver's side" or "passenger's side". You could also be on the neutral ground side (left) or the other side. Or the rider could be on the "lake side" (left) or the river side (right). Parades run South to North and the Mississippi River would be on the rider's right and Lake Pontchartrain on the left.

Aviation uses a clock face (traffic is at your 2'oclock, northbound) to reference traffic at the pilot's right / front.

> "Skier's left/right" for snow skiing. Ambiguity arises when looking uphill or downhill.

But what about “snowboarder’s left”… sounds a lot like “starboard’s left” at which everybody on the fake ski slope on the cruise ship gets incredibly confused? We have to drive out all ambiguity here, or people are doing to die.

Another is the right/left bank of a river always refers to the perspective of the water flowing/facing downstream.

I also really like the theatrical world’s convention of “upstage” (further from the audience) and “downstage” (closer to the audience) - disambiguating the front and back of a stage.

Afaik, this is not the case in all other languages to have specific nautical terms for sides. I asked a sailor friend for the terminology in our language and it's just left side and right side/flank, seems pretty self explanatory, by convention you are orienting forwards. Like any profession though, having specific terminology helps distinguish from the outside group and maintain impression of expertise.

> seems pretty self explanatory

On a big ship, like an aircraft carrier or cruiser, you can qite easily lose track of which direction is the prow (front). Many carrier crew rarely go up on deck. And if the ship happens to be sailing astern, left and right become ambiguous.

The advantage of using separate words for the frame of reference of the boat is that you can still use left and right with their normal meanings as well.

"It'll be starboard side, hung up on the left."

But I can also say:

"I'm on the left side of the boat, and hold an apple in my left hand." The boat has a clearly distinguishable bow and stern, so it provides a frame of reference.

As I was reading your comment I was thinking "huh, that's interesting." But then I remembered: surfers use left/right as well, for instance if a wave breaks right or left. They use the perspective of being in the ocean and looking back at the shore, as opposed to the shore looking out to the ocean. I remember asking that very question when I first started.

In theatrical context, they also use "house left" and "house right" for similar effect but with a different perspective

At a ski hill, it's skiers left/right so you know it's from the reference of someone going down the hill. Drivers side, passenger side...

French (maybe its in english too actually, natives could comment) say rive gauche and rive droit for which bank of the river or lake we talk about. Always taken from perspective of river flowing downhill. Makes sense, just takes some time getting used to when coming from language which doesnt obsess about it that much

This is true in english also. The right/left bank of a river is always from the perspective of the water flowing/facing downstream.

Left and Right didn't have their modern meaning back then. In Old English riht meant straight, as in direct or not bent. It later assumed the meaning of correct as in right and wrong. Lyft meant weak. Their reference to handedness seems to have been incidental. It seems odd to us to talk about the 'straight' and 'weak' hand, but to them it made sense, but maybe not to talk about the 'straight' or 'weak' sides of a boat.

The concept of left and right hands was not very commonly used historically. It wasn't important to most people. During the English Civil War many recruits didn't know which hand or foot was left or right. During marching training instructors used to stick some hay in one boot and straw in the other for each recruit and call out "Hay, Straw, Hay, Straw".

Then you have cars, where left/right would make perfect sense in all cars from the driver’s perspective but instead people use “nearside” and “offside” which are relative to the kerb while driving[1]. That means it’s relative to which side of the road the country drives on so if you drive a right-hand-drive UK car into mainland Europe, do nearside and offside swap on that car and you need to buy differently named replacement parts?

Always annoying that it could be clearer and more stable and shorter to use the driver’s perspective with “Driver left/right” to be specific and then would be the same sides on all cars moving or parked in any orientation in all countries.

[1] not valid if you turn around and park backwards!

There's also the convention of inside and outside lanes on multilane roads.

In each the UK, Ireland, and the United States, the inside lane is the leftmost lane. However, due to driving on the opposite sides of the road, this means that while the inside lane in the US is closest to the central median, in the UK & Ireland, the inside lane is closet to the curb.

Source: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/inside-l...

I would venture a guess the logic in some of these cases has a healthy does of practical wisdom baked in. On sailing vessels they are/were? chaotic, violent, noisy, and the crew perhaps wasn't the most experienced/educated(?) so keeping things simple with fixed names was perhaps the optimal safety solution in that environment. In the medical profession it's about the Hippocratic Oath (I am not a doctor), an operating room is more controlled, and everyone (is usually) well trained, so maybe in that environment it makes more sense to make a rule that the perspective should always be the patients? Thinking out loud here more than anything...

At the other extreme you have the medical profession where the first thing you learn in medical school is that left/right always refer to the patient's perspective.

In an effort to avoid ambiguity, I always talk to my doctor in terms of "driver's side" and "passenger side" - thus adopting the maritime approach, but in more common terms.

> theatrical world takes an intermediate approach, where they use the terms "stage left / stage right”

Same for skiers’ left and right.

I remember some time ago Cisco Nexus equipment that had different catalog definitions in the NX series (2000/5000/7000/9000) of the Air Intake definitions of where the "Front" was in a Front to Back fan setup. You literally had to order skus with conflicting descriptions if you wanted a consistent system.

Interestingly, on tennis courts you have the “deuce” side, which is to the right of the player, and the “ad” side, which is to the left of the player. Because you have two players facing each other, the deuce sides for each player are diagonally opposite from a neutral observer’s perspective.

> in medical school is that left/right always refer to the patient's perspective.

What if the patient lies on his back vs on his stomach? Theoretically this should then revert left and right in addition to how the doctors are facing the patient, from their point of view.

The patient's left and patient's right are always going to be the same, regardless of which way the patient is facing. It'll change it from the doctor's perspective, but that's irrelevant since you're only looking at it from the patient's.

Your left hand doesn't turn into your right hand if you lie on the bed different way

How about always using world relative words?

https://www.naturalnavigator.com/news/2010/09/guugu-yimithir...

As a camera operator or director I always tended to use "your left/right", "my left/right" or "camera left/right". The first two made their way into my everyday speak as well.

> The theatrical world takes an intermediate approach, where they use the terms "stage left / stage right",

The opposite of that, rarely used but still out there, is house left/house right.

Would using the phrases “patient-left” and “patient-right” improve outcomes in the case of operating on the wrong side of the body?

In french, on stage, it's "cour" (stage left) and "jardin" (stage right), meanings yard and garden.

Some medical terms become hugely helpful when receiving a massage: "more medial, more lateral"

We also use "house left/house right" to describe the audience perspective.

Interesting. I always assumed “stage left” meant from the perspective of looking at the stage.

How much has the ambiguity between right (direction) and right (correct) cost the world?

> At the other extreme you have the medical profession where the first thing you learn in medical school is that left/right always refer to the patient's perspective.

Didn't know that! So how pervasive is this principal? Would it apply to a descriptive reference to a diagram in a book for example?

Yes. As a random example, you'll see that although the lungs are seen from the perspective of a doctor facing a patient, they are labelled left/right from the patient's perspective: https://www.therespiratorysystem.com/wp-content/uploads/2017...

I think the principle is pretty pervasive also outside medicals. I do not recall anyone ever refer to my left hand as right hand (other than maybe by mistake), regardless how they are oriented around me.

After all, doctors are humans and also have a body. It would be strange for them to write books saying that the heart is [#] on the right side when they have it on their left, etc.

[%] usually, because this is HN

When I was a kid in Minnesota we needed to learn port/starboard and the colors red/green.

A trick that helped me remember is that "LEFT", "PORT", and "RED" are all the shorter words and "RIGHT", "STARBOARD", and "GREEN" are the longer words in the respective pairs.

FWIW.

This would probably throw my girlfriend off.

She has some kind of right/left dyslexia. When she's driving and I'm giving directions I have to tell her "short turn" or "long turn". Long turn being left, longer because it's across a lane, right turns are shorter.

But if someone told her that left is shorter than right for remembering purposes, it would probably mess her up more when following driving directions.

Holy crap my wife is the same, I have to tell her "turn my way" or "turn your way".

It drives me insane as I always subconsciously interpret it as a form of lazyness, your framing of it as a form od dyslexia may finally allow me to be less bothered by it!

I was once driving along fine in the left lane and my female friend in the passenger seat suddenly yelled "TURN RIGHT HERE. RIGHT HERE! RIGHT HERE!!!"

So I cut across two lanes, avoided several oncoming motorists and made a hasty but decent emergency right turn into the parking lot.

She looked disgusted and said "Why did you do that? The place is RIGHT over there" and pointed to an area on the other side of the street on the left of where I'd been. "Why didn't you turn left RIGHT THERE WHEN I TOLD YOU TO!".

Ah, I loved that girl (platonicly). She hit me with a shoe one time, but I still feel bad for who she married.

Whenever I hear the words 'left' and 'right' and have to act on them, i slightly twitch the corresponding arm or foot, and then can orient myself accordingly.

I "know" where my right arm is and I can feel it instinctively (as a right handed person, it's my main, default arm). But apparently my brain cannot map those words to directions in the outside world until it establishes a positional relation to my own body. I used to be ridiculed as a child for not knowing left from right until I developed the twitching trick.

This sounds like a potentially dangerous condition to have if you drive, no? Is there a name for this?

or playfully, "no, the OTHER right" :)

My driving instructor had short pieces of colored tape on the beams between the windshield and side windows.

He would say to people with such problem "turn in the next left blue" every time.

So when they got to their test and and the tester will say to them "turn in the next right" their brain will add a "red" and they will look it up in the car and find it on the right beam.

He claimed it usually solved the issue.

I'm interested in the about the phrasing "in the next left/right."

Are you located in the US?

I moved from the mid-west to NYC and learned a fun regional language difference about waiting with others: Those from the NYC area say that they are "standing on line" whereas I had grown up saying "standing in line."

That little in vs. on sounds so different!

Completely unrelated… my mom had a small dog when she was younger. The dog sustained a head injury at some point, and after that could only make right turns. If the dog wanted to go left, it had to turn 270 degrees to the right. In all other ways the dog was completely normal. But now I’m wondering if the dog wanted to lie on its left side, would it lie on its right side, roll into its back, and then settle on its left side?

I also have a hesitation when it comes to left/right. As a kid I could only ever remember it as "left is the arm I wear my watch" so even as an adult I always had to take a second to think "watch arm or not" even a decade into the cell phone era when I stopped wearing a watch.

Now I live in Japan and when I speak Japanese I don't have the same problem at all. The brain (or at least my brain,) is a weird.

In our relationship it's me who has that. So she'll tell me "right" and "no, the other right". Or vice versa.

My wife has the same issue. I say turn "your side" or turn "my side."

I was taught "Jack left port" and I know port (wine) is red.

Fun times ahead if you do international driving :)

I learned “right red dead” in aviation - if you see the red light right of the green light, it means the other plane is headed for you!

I was taught the mnemonic “There’s no red port left in the bottle”. Port wine is red.

I think "there's some red port left in the bottle" would be better ; the negation kinda made me think "red" (or "port") was NOT "left".

From memory the No Red Port Left is also about Red on Red passing for ships

Nice. Except I prefer Tawny Port, but I'll still remember it.

Port wine (in a decanter) is also traditionally passed to the left when being poured.

P.J. O'Rourke made the quip that "port wine is red, and so is your face if you get port and starboard mixed up." Which doesn't help, but it's funny.

For sailors, we learn "red-right-returning," which means to keep the red aids to navigation on the right (starboard) side when returning to port. Which is great, except when it doesn't apply--parts of Europe, Australia, a lot of Asia.

You'd think this would be a solved problem by now, but nope.

It's unfortunate that some headphones have a red "(R)" symbol to mark the right side, which is the opposite of the red = port convention.

Left is larboard (starts with L), which isn't starboard. So starboard is right. When you're facing the prow, of course!

Or simply StaRRRboard is right

PoRRRt!

probably not very politically correct anymore, but "You Write with your Right"

(also righty tighty, lefty loosey)

I understand that the terms are mostly unambiguous, but I always wonder how these get defined in edge cases. For example ferries, at least where I live, alternate the direction of travel as they go back and forth. There isn't a fixed "bow" or "stern" from which to define port and starboard.

This is a great question imo but I struggled to find anything very good. I found a forum post, https://www.sailnet.com/threads/double-ended-ferries-which-e... and between the trolling it seems that fore/aft and port/starboard switch when the direction reverses, including eg navigation lights (red for port, green for starboard). And they tend to also have a one end and a two end or an A/B end, and those labels don’t change.

I've seen the 1 and 2 labels on barges near me.

I suspect they just don't use this terminology, unless it's to communicate with other vessels, and then it's presumably based on movement direction like you say.

Does that mean when you file a maintenance request they have to number everything on the ship since "aft 2nd floor" doesn't narrow things down much?

Spars and ribs (frame) are usually numbered, often based on distance, like interstate exits.

"Ten sequential rivets debonded on aft starboard #273 spar" would then be a writeup.

The Washington State ferry system uses double-ended vessels with a pilot house on each end with the crew swapping between them at each crossing. Whichever end the crew are at becomes the bow.[1]

Funny -- I've ridden the ferries a lot and never really thought about it.

1. https://www.sailnet.com/threads/double-ended-ferries-which-e...

Kirkland, WA resident here. There is signage on the boat that uniquely identifies the #1 end and the #2 end of the boat. Can be helpful in finding your way back to your vehicle if you drove onto the ferry instead of being a walk-on passenger.

The thing to remember is that those directions are used for an awful number of things that have nothing to do with the ship moving. Like when you name places for storing things or various pieces of equipment. Changing those names would create a lot of mayhem.

When I captain a boat it is more important for me to communicate things unequivocally. I need to be able to specify what I want to happen, precisely. The crew does not really need to concern themselves with the direction the boat is moving or what is the bigger plan. They just get orders to do specific tasks. Only I (or whoever is responsible for the boat at the moment) really need to understand the context of those tasks although ideally the crew would also understand why they are doing things so that they can anticipate further orders or signal when I make a mistake.

Why this is important is because the plan may sometimes change and then my job is to put a new set of orders and I can't really start by explaining what the new changed plan is or getting any consent.

I was never in a situation like that, but if I was captaining a boat that can change directions, I would still keep stable naming that does not change when the boat stops or changes directions.

Though, as it turns out, double-ended craft are defined by the direction they are operating.

I'm curious on other items that are defined in this way. Is does make sense that broad rules are lifted for obvious reasons. Is why I can name a few things where screw threading is reversed from what we typically use.

Those ferries should be switching the direction the crew faces (perhaps in a different structure on the other end of the boat) and turning on the appropriate lights so port and starboard are lit correctly. They should have two sets of colored lights to handle travel in both directions.

Don't they have to swap the lights anyway if the ferry reverses direction? After all, the red/green indicators are primarily for showing which direction the ship is moving in.

With double ended ferries you're going to dock bow first because that's the direction all the cars pointed.

If you got halfway through a crossing and they announced there's a problem at the destination (broken thruster, docks on fire, dragons, docks on fire because of dragons), you would have to turn the ship around 180º and go back to your origin with the same bow that you started the trip with so everyone could disembark. The only time you'd switch ship orientation mid-trip is if something broke such that one end of the ship was navigable and the other was not. At which point you'd either have to dock backward (maybe with a tug) or everyone would have to back off the ship.

If I understand you correctly, yes, exactly.

P and S are really defined by the direction of travel or what you decide they are. They are just conventions.

The Torpoint ferry in Plymouth (Devon, UK) is on chains, so front and back, bow and stern etc is moot. I think we can simply redefine that sort of ferry as a fish and avoid any snags. That strategy seems to work for astronomy when trying to wrangle planet/dwarf planet/lump of stuff n that.

(EDIT: speling)

Oh great, now we will have flying ferrys.... or perhaps swimming planes!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgweA8tlh8Q

Bee fish! What a delightful idea. We do seem to insist on the weird when we elect officials in democracy lands. On the bright side we do actually get to elect these odd balls rather than have them dropped into place from above.

Back in the day, in England at least, otters were classified as fish too for the purpose of allowable nosh on a Friday for your discerning Catholic. Nowadays we munch on depleted cod stocks and chips. Yum!

How on earth that became a thing in a country where it is impossible to get around 70 miles away from the sea beggars belief. There are also rather a lot of rivers hereabouts but we don't generally munch on freshwater fish here either - WTF?

Ha! I thought of this in one of the down thread discussions. Very curious on any official answer here, and I'll have to pay attention to the lights on the ferry, next time I'm on it.

But they are on a fixed route…

For bidirectional ferries, I assume they just pick a direction all the way back at design time and stick to it.

The direction might not matter, but consistency does.

I’m fairly confident that the “bow” in that case is always the direction of travel in this case and that starboard/port side change.

The lighting scheme on ships indicates the starboard side with a green light and the port side with a red light. This allows ships to figure out which way another ship is heading - especially at night. If you can see the red light on the left and green on the right while facing the other ship it’s going away from you, if it’s reversed then it’s coming towards you. If you can only see green it’s going to your right, to your left if you can see red.

Retaining that property is important for navigation, so starboard and port have to swap sides.

Pretty much every boat with onboard motors are capable of reversing thrust. Do they all switch like that when traveling in reverse? (Serious question, not a boat person, never been on a boat that wasn't a ferry )

They can’t do it that way because the question of right of way only matters when two boats are going towards each other. The coloration is an easy visual indicator of where a boat is generally going that doesn’t require seeing any other part of the boat to work, and will even work in fog. You cannot safely flip the directions for any fraction of the boat’s travel.

Retired USN Surface Warfare Officer here.

The differentiation between rudder and engine is crucial. The Conning Officer, who gives orders to the helm at the direction of the Officer of the Deck, will call rudder orders as "left standard rudder" or "right full rudder".

Engine orders will be given in terms of "all engines ahead 1/3", "back 1/3" or "port engine ahead 1/3, starboard engine back 1/3" (to put a clockwise twist on when maneuvering). Frequently when on a great circle voyage, one may have the port shaft making turns for, e.g. 13kts, and the starboard shaft just trailing in the water, for fuel efficiency.

The crucial point here is that these order terms are like strong data types in code. We do not mix them. In a stressful situation, e.g. the Straits of Malacca, the last thing anyone needs is entropy from a terminology mix-up. Lives are literally at stake.

Bonus point: the port/starboard nomenclature is also applies to spatial locations off of the centerline. Compartments go, level, frame (bow to stern numbering), centerline position. e.g.

6 4 2 0 1 3 5

Thus, as a young lad at the end of the Cold War, working on Aegis in CG-57, my computer room was O1-138-0-C.

The centerline numbering is in accordance with PESO: Port: Even, Starboard: Odd.

To this day, I set up my cel phone headset IAW PESO, based upon the day of the month. Go, Navy.

Best comment in this thread, a lot of folks seem to be stuck on the etymology rather than the very deliberate use of special keywords in collabrative working.

Sailing, Flight, Surgery; All of these require people to work together, in scenarios where a misinterpreted instruction can cost lives.

The Tenerife Airport Disaster, still the deadliest aviation accident was caused by bad communication procedures. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenerife_airport_disaster#Comm...

Because you need to differentiate between "my left when facing the boat" and "my left when on the boat facing forward" or really, left from any other perspective.

And any time there's a multi-word phrase like that that gets used a lot over many years, it gets shortened.

Of course, but this article explains what each word means.

Starboard => Means "steering side of the boat" (b/c the oar was on the right side due to sailors mostly being right handed)

Port => The side that faces the port when docked

You can dock a boat anyway you like, or have been instructed to do so by the dockmaster.

From Wikipedia:

“Vessels with bilateral symmetry have left and right halves which are mirror images of each other. One asymmetric feature is where access to a boat, ship, or aircraft is at the side, it is usually only on the port side (hence the name)”

But if you have a steering board on the other side of your ship, it's a lot easier to dock facing the other way.

Passenger vessels typically dock port side to the dock. Same with aircraft.

Port makes sense, never thought about it. Ships I see rarely, so I couldn't tell which side they use (or even both depending on the harbor) But for passenger planes it's definitely left.

In German starboard is steuerbord, steuern = to steer. No shifting over the centuries.

However, port is still backbord. I am not familiar with Northern dialects (where they have a coast), back does not tell me anything. Maybe packen = to pack/load)??? Interestingly enough the English argument that the 2 words should not be too similar has not been applied. Maybe because there are already 3 vs. 2 syllables? Whereas English had 2 and 2 so they changed to 2 vs. 1 to make it make obvious what was said even in a big storm?

Similarly, the Danish terms are »styrbord« and »bagbord«, respectively. »Bagbord« comes from »bag« (back) meaning the backside of the sailor steering the boat, because they would be facing the steering side (»styrbord«; »styr« still means to steer today).

I remember thinking why didn’t they just use “boat left” or something, but then at the sailing coarse I took, I remember there was a boat heading toward us and I was skippering, had to communicate exactly how I wanted to pass the other ship - and saying “to port” was just soo simple and easy - a “to our boats left” would have been way too long and you had to communicate things quite quickly… That’s when it “clicked” how useful this shorthand really was.

they need the same terminology for humans:

"raise you left hand. no, your other left!"

The only was I can remember which is port and starboard is by thinking about boarding an airplane. The steps/tunnel are always docked on the 'port' side, just as boats always dock on the port side. The cockpit/bow is always on your left when you board.

My shortcut: "port" and "left" have the same number of letters.

And further, "port" wine is red, and the red beacon light is on the port side of an aeroplane (with the starboard side having green, and white on the tail)

the shorter word:

    port
    left
    red

the longer word;

    starboard
    right
    green

This is the same method I use. I always wondered why they didn't use the cardinal directions (north, east, south, west) or why they didn't use the hours of a clock face to indicate direction. With the clock face, you get even more precision where exactly something happened. Man overboard, 4 o'clock!

r and s are next to each other, l is closer to p than to anything else.

I always remember the phrase ‘there’s no port left in the bottle’. Similarly, the port-side navigation lights are red, the same colour as port.

It's not true in general that boats always dock on the port side.

I’ve always remembered it by “port and left both have 4 letters”. It has always worked for me.

That'll trip you up if you ever board Tally Ho, her front door is on the starboard[0].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpulXX1cros

Always? Ferries are boats, demonstrably not true there as they dock both sides.

And "fore" and "aft" are useful to disambiguate the ends of boats that flip 90 degrees in pitch, because the front becomes the top and the back becomes the bottom.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULvLeK9O7fY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shPATcV9Dzw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQxQfQU_hsk

I wish they gave or examples as to why simple left and right would be confusing, and how port and starboard are different and better.

Maybe because I'm from a landlocked country, but this article didn't help me understand the why.

A sailor, looking towards the back of the boat:

- There's an incoming boat !

- From where ?

- From the left !

Is it the left of the sailor, or is it the left of the vessel ?

You only know which side is port or starboard by figuring out your orientation compared to the ship and picking the left side of the ship.

So it’s not actually achieving anything. You could just say left always refers to the ship’s left.

They say that it's because "left" and "right" depend on your orientation (it would perhaps be confusing to talk about "the left side of the boat" if you're facing the stern (rear) and the side in question is on your right).

It's probably a similar reason people talk about the "driver's side" and "passenger's side" of a car instead of the left and right sides.

OK but what if you don't know their car is starboard-side drive?

Nearside (near the kerb) and offside (the other side).

The concept of left and right hands was not commonly used historically. During the English Civil War many recruits didn't know which hand or foot was left or right. During marching training instructors used to stick some hay in one boot and straw in the other for each recruit and call out "Hay, Straw, Hay, Straw".

Imagine ten sailors on a ship, each facing a different direction and trying to coordinate their actions by shouting ‘left’ and ‘right’ to each other.

- Turn it left, no, I mean the ship’s left, not my left!

You could just shout ship's left or boat's left or shorten those to shleft or something, more intuitive than all those old terms

It's a bit like theater - left and right are different depending on whether you're looking at the stage (such as from the audience) or looking out from the stage. So you have to have "stage left" and "house left" (and the same for right) to distinguish them. But it's still confusing if somebody just says left. Which left?

So they could just say something like "ship left" and "ship right" that are always referenced to the bow of the ship, and that would work almost as well, but having special terms just removes any possibility for confusion.

No different than a house - you don't refer to the Left Wing, but the West Wing.

Where is West?

better https://www.divescotty.com/underwater-blog/boat-side-starboa...

I like this description, but I have always thought that the saying "There is some red port left in the bottle" a much simpler way of remembering the conjunction of these terms. Assuming you are fasting forwards in the boat of course!

Great description of the meaning behind the red and green lights on boats, thanks for sharing.

Much better explanation! Thanks for linking it in.

There's kind of a fun brain teaser related to this. Imagine you're speaking to an entirely alien species in another dimension. And you're trying to describe "left" to them. It's impossible.

I say it's a brain teaser only because this sounds highly improbable at first. Forwards and backwards can be described, and even up/down if we assume basic fundamental rules remain the same. Yet left and right? It seems impossible for it to be impossible.

It turns out you can define it from looking at radioactive decay (or any other interaction governed by the weak force). Feynman famously had a short description that ended with the punch line

> Suppose, after lots of communication you finally can go into space and meet your alien counterpart. If, as you approach one another, the alien extends its left hand to shake, watch out! He’s made of antimatter!

because even the physics of weak decays of will invert in an antimatter universe.

I think it should also be possible with electro magnetism. By first defining the sign convention for electron flow and then deriving left hand and right hand rules of magnetism or something like that. It’s a bit tricky to explain the sign convention, but I think if one sticks with the movement of elementary particles, it should work.

That claim needs to be substantiated.

It isn't impossible, it is just arbitrary. The whole reason we can have this huge thread about different names for directions is that they is just arbitrary labels, with groups of people having a consensus on what word to use.

BTW, If you really must explain it without just saying it is arbitrary, you can talk about clockwise vs. counterclockwise... which came from sundials, which came from the direction our shadows move as the sun moves. In a similar vein, Left goes against the shadows, Right follows the shadows.

That's entirely relative to the direction that a body is orbiting about another.

Shadows come from the rotation of the earth, not its orbit. But you are still correct - if the earth suddenly started having inconsistency in the direction it spins, that explanation would fall apart.

I think this is due to the bilateral symmetry of most animals. But imagine being non-symmetric yourself (or the alien race being non-symmetric). The concepts of left and right seem to become much more communicable now.

Yeah the handedness of a 3D coordinate system is a pretty arbitrary low level choice. You don’t even need to talk to aliens, just try implementing some geometric algorithm in Unity which uses a left-handed system.

Not sure I understand. Directions are relative. I'd describe "left" how I describe every other direction.

How would you describe it?

One approach would be: you're moving along a straight line, perpendicular to a large body that attracts you through gravity.

Now "down" is towards the gravity, "up" is the opposite direction, and "left" and "right" are perpendicular, but which one is left and right, if you cannot rely on handedness?

Just draw a view frustum and mark up, down, left, right, near, far.

Imagine they use word 'right' for 'left' but you don't know about it. How will you describe true left/right to them?

Too bad there are no good substitutes for general use that don't make you sound like a wannabe pirate.

On one of our products (that has symmetric speakers, sensors and lights) we use "proper left" and "proper right" in reference material. The markings are also molded on the chassis. It makes communicating with technicians in the field so much easier.

This explanation feels kind of awkward. My left hand does not depend on my orientation, so I am unclear why the "left side" of a boat would.

I get why there are better terms to use when talking about others. At least, I think I do. But it feels like there is more history to these terms than just "needs to be fixed."

Because left and right are ambiguous - are you talking about MY left or the boat’s left? Having unambiguous names let’s us differentiate and avoid confusion.

It might be hard to grok the need for this if you’ve never been in a tight spot while sailing or operating a watercraft with a crew - but having this distinction has probably saved thousands of bad incidents from happening.

There's a similar issue in medical imaging, when oriented with the patient "facing you". Then my left is patient right and vice versa.

This is why in the days of processed x-ray films, TV shows would more commonly hang a chest x-ray incorrectly[1], with the (patient's) "left" label on the left instead of the right. It's less common now that the example imaging is digital.

[1] https://screenrant.com/scrubs-xray-gag-joke-deeper-meaning/

I can see it as advantageous. With the major caveat that it is only advantageous to folks that have been taught it. Not shockingly, a large portion of the passengers on a boat are going to be confused if told to go to the starboard windows to see the whales that are beside the boat. How will you explain it? I'm going to guess that you will probably say "right." :D. (Note that this isn't hypothetical. I take a ferry fairly often, and surprisingly few of us know starboard from port.)

Yes but why would you ever be talking about your left? Use the definite article, THE left, and it should be clear by convention for the sailors.

I think it's just historical.

True but you are not wandering around yourself! I agree though that the first para looks like just so nonsense. I know plenty of matelots (UK Navy) that use left and right, sharp end and blunt end for the cardinal points of a vessel. I do as well and use port, starb'd, bow and stern as they do too.

Ironically enough, port and starboard markers which are the red and green buoys you see near to ports (yes!) need to be considered in reverse when going out. The green ones are called starboard markers and if you are in a big enough vessel, you should keep them off your starboard (right) side when approaching a port from the open seas. On the way out from port to the open seas you should keep the red ones on your right instead. If you don't you will hit the seabed and sink.

Once you have got the hang of p/s buoys, you just need to get to grips with cardinal markers and a few other things and the way you drive on the sea will start to make sense. Even Brits drive on the right on the seas!

There is a general rule that "power gives way to sail". That's fine for vessels of similar size. However I have seen 30' yachts on the Baltic try to persuade 100,000+ tonne tankers of this and not really getting the fact that inertia means that the big lump can't really turn in any meaningful way - they sort of orbit!

Overtaking vessel keeps clear. On odd numbered years when Mars is in Saturn on a Friday you should dance with a Nun for three minutes at midnight every 70 days, unless it's Lent or you are a Nun in which case you should dance with an otter. There are a few more rules but that is largely it. Maritime isn't too complicated but do remember that the road has a habit of jumping 30' or more upwards or down simply for a laugh.

> Ironically enough, port and starboard markers which are the red and green buoys you see near to ports (yes!) need to be considered in reverse when going out. The green ones are called starboard markers and if you are in a big enough vessel, you should keep them off your starboard (right) side when approaching a port from the open seas. On the way out from port to the open seas you should keep the red ones on your right instead. If you don't you will hit the seabed and sink.

Just to keep things fun, that's the european convention. In the US it's "red right returning", the exact opposite.

Because "boat left" and "boat right" just didn't catch on.

Because if you face the back of the boat the sides reverse. It’s similar to stage left. When you can’t afford to be confused, one name is better than a conflicting argument between your left and the boats left.

But if I'm looking at you and speak of your left hand, I am not speaking of the hand to my left. Literally nobody does that. At least not on purpose.

There is no "left", there is only "your left" or "my left".

This is not the same explanation that I was familiar with. The one I heard was that long ago boats didn't have the rudder on the centerline, but was to one side. Because of this configuration you also had to have the dock on the other side. The rudder was called the a steer-board (eventually pronounced starboard). And the dock was the port so that became the port side. So now we have starboard and port sides of the ship from this old boat type.

Reminds me a similar bit about some dimension of the space shuttle being limited by the width of a horse's ass [0].

[0] https://dwanethomas.com/roman-chariots-and-the-space-shuttle...

Sorry, how is it not? AFAICT this is the same thing the linked article says.

You know what. I read the article and for some reason it did not see the meaning for words. I need some sleep or coffee.

An additional starboard/port issue is right of way for sailboats. Suppose that you're going upwind and two close hauled boats are crossing. Who has right of way?

  When boats are on opposite tacks, a port-tack boat shall keep clear of a starboard-tack boat. Rule 10.

  A boat is on the tack, starboard or port, corresponding to her windward side. RRS Definitions.

Also a convenient way to remember right of way while on the water is to use the port/starboard lights of the approaching boat. If you see green (their starboard side) that means you have the right of way, and red means they have the right of way. Just like traffic lights :)

That only applies between power boats. Between sailboats the direction of wind is what determines the right of way.

And of course power boats must give way to sailing vessels.

In Greek boating terms, we use just plain left and right. At sailing school we were taught that left means always the left side of the ship as it travels forward, and similarly the right.

We do use different words for the direction of the ship facing towards or away from the wind though.

Not sure if the ancients used other words though. We managed to avoid confusion for a few hundred years though.

In Spanish is babor/estribor. Nothing to do with izquierda/derecha, no idea about etimology on this.

It has the same origin as the English equivalents.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/estribor

Here's a related story I was told[0]:

Ships began using centre-mounted, bladed rudders so that they could be more easily docked at the Hanseatic League port of Ipswich in England.

It seems obvious to put a rudder at the centre of a boat now but prior to this development rudders were mounted on the starboard (steering) side. That's where a steering oar would naturally enter the water when the man holding is standing on the centre line of the boat. They just copied that position when they first added bladed rudders.

Specifically they moved the rudder to the centre so that they could more easily turn around in the Orwell[1] estuary. Something to do with Ipswich's port being on the opposite side of the river to most other ports in the region.

The earliest known depiction of a centre-mounted, bladed rudder is on an 11th century seal of the town now in the Royal Greenwich Museum[2].

To this day the town's crest features three centre mounted rudders and a lion[3].

It's a fun story but do take it with pinch of salt as I can't verify it. :)

0. On a history tour by an old chap with an impenetrable Suffolk accent. Not sure if that counts as a good source of truth but it was certainly entertaining.

1. Another fun bit of trivia, that's the river that George Orwell named himself after.

2. https://www.rmg.co.uk/collections/objects/rmgc-object-64185

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ipswich#/media/File:Coat_of_Ar...

It's funny to me that some olaf 1000 years ago just called them what they were; the steering side and the docking side, and now we have to use the same words which don't make any sense to us. I vote we just call them the steering-side and the docking-side again.

My understanding is that port’s usage is somewhat recent. In the English sailing world the opposite of starboard was larboard. The royal navy made the change within the last few hundred years.

One of the fun things I learned when reading master and commander was this.

The steering side is now the back. And docking .. in the Mediterranean the docking side is commonly the back too. In Scandinavia it's commonly the front.

It's probably for the best that they've been detached from their original meanings.

Unfortunately, we no longer have consistent steering and docking sides. So first you're going to have to rebuild a lot of ships.

Because the words come from Dutch nautical terms. “Starboard” is really “Steer-board”, an external keel on one side of a boat. Therefore Port is the only side of the boat that can dock to the port.

The old Norse term "stjόrnborði" likely predates the dutch and old English terms, fwiw.

Stjόrn means stern, so the back of the boat. I'm guess borði refers to the rudder itself, meaning plank.

From what I gather the OP story is bunk. It's easy to verify.

Yes, this is exactly what the fine article says. It's not very long.

Old English, actually, as the very succinct OP explains

The etymology hails from old Norse and the Viking age, before making it into English. Styrbord, the side you steer (styr) on, and Babord/bakbord, the side your back (bak/bakåt) faces.

One domain where this concept of handling ambiguous left and right in natural language is generative image AI models like StableDiffusion. What I wouldn't give for a clear syntax to define what I mean when I say "left side" or "to the right" in a way that captures a character or object which may be rotated in any number of positions. Running 100 generations with the same prompt and different seeds demonstrates how hard this is to solve using words.

It gets even more confusing when the commanding officer orders hard a starboard. Does that mean turn the wheel left or right? Apparently it depends on the ship. There is the unsubstantiated story the Titanic crew bungled this. https://www.reuters.com/article/idINIndia-51664720100922

A large part of learning to sail a boat is learning the terminology.

Everything has a name and none of the names coincide with non-nautical experience.

For instance, a “rope” on a sailboat refers to the metal part of a line usually used to the main sail. What non-sailors would call a rope, sailors call a line.

There’s a working vocabulary of 50-100 such terms and then hundreds more when you start talking about very specific pieces of equipment.

Great info. So starboard is where the steering wheel is. Like in cars in England or Japan it's the right side. Now I know how to remember that.

The words "port" and "left" have 4 letters each. That is how I remember it.

These seem no less confusing honestly (do they still load from the "port" side? What about yachts?). They reference a particular side of the boat but as referenced to a specific spot on the boat (where the steering is or was in the past). If you are not standing there, you still need to do some mapping in your head.

Same issue in auto repair. It’d be nice to use port/starboard when referring to stuff in an engine compartment or on a car in general.

Is it left as in I’m looking at the engine or left as if I was sitting in the car? I think it’s the latter, but I always forget.

Can’t use driver’s/passenger’s side for orientation either.

I always knew port was left and starboard was right, but I basically used the trick "left is four letters, like port". I like learning etymology, though, because now I don't need some trick, I just understand the reason that the word is used.

For those who think left/right is enough: When you are racing sailboats, a boat on your “left” (or “right”) can have “right” of way because the wind is hitting their main sail from the “right” and yours from the “left”.

They will yell “starboard!” at you, rather than “left” or “right”. Easier that way.

My brother in law works in building airplanes. Since a lot of the big pieces are mirrors of each other, the factories themselves are divided into two “sides”. In Spain they are called Left and Right, but in the UK they use the maritime terms instead.

Fun and easy mnemonic:

  Port = LEFT (4 letters in each word, same vowel/consonant placement)

  Port = Red as in Port Wine 

  Therefore, navigation lights: Red = Port = Left

If you remember that, then starboard is just "not port"

Worth mentioning that harbour signal lights are not the same the world over

https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/69030/why-does-t...

Back when i had sailing lessons, the skipper told us this story about the sailors coming home to harbour after weeks of sailing the oceans. They returned to their loved ones who they kept in their HEART which is RED and LEFT and since they were sailing towards the port, the RED lights are to be kept left from the ship.

It stuck.

Laughing at myself for ignorance but I thought "port" was east because sailing south from Europe meant that the ports were on the left, and the stars were on the right and most cargo ships didn't make it back. Sigh

For trains it is just left/right. "Please exit the train on the left side."

Related: Why is it called a "poop deck"?

https://emmacruises.com/poop-decks-what-are-they-and-why-are...

Presumably it came from Latin 'puppis' (aft, stern, poop deck) before the passing through French to English.

In the US Navy, helm orders are given as left/right, not port/starboard.

This question is the cousin of In the North-pole, which direction is South?

When it gets really confusing is when you are on a sailboat and get the command to pull 'altabasa' (you may know it's a type of rope, but no idea which one or even where is the pulling location).

If you stand with your front to the captain, you're right is his left.

That's why.

Does it really explain why or even give a reason that makes sense. The steering was right so right side was called starboard? How does that make sense? So just call right right and left left.

Yeah, it's not really an explanation.

Governments should use outer 3d body scans instead of photos to reduce the mayhem that mirrors, cameras and screens cause in the unconscious of humans. Also ban vehicles with mirrored letters.

I read that the British word posh comes from Port Out - Starboard Home, which is the type of UK to US return ticket you’d get, if you could afford it, to have a cabin facing the sun both ways.

Same reason we have North/South/East/West, basically

I love articles like this. Snappy, to the point, without unnecessary fluff. And I actually learned something. I enjoy understanding the history of language and culture.

To this day, at airports around the world aircraft are almost exclusively loaded (the passengers, at least) on the port side. Funny how these traditions continue!

I've worked on two different plasma devices where the engineers used a different coordinate system from the scientists.

> English words: stéor (meaning "steer") and bord (meaning "the side of a boat")

"steer" as in steer manure?

And through all of this, all I can think of is "There's Klingons on the starboard bow, starboard bow, starboard bow."

Wipe them off, Jim.

What are correct naming for skiing slope direction?

Left/right might mean looking from the mountain top, or from the bottom as on maps.

In German: starboard = Steuerbord

From steuern, much closer phonetically to stéor, with the meaning of to steer, to direct, to control

It's easy to remember (if you have to) what side port is since port has four letters just like left.

"The ship left the port".

Now you'll always remember that port is the left side.

The first paragraph is the right answer. See also inboard/outboard, fwd/aft.

I wonder why more people are right-handed. What could be a biological basis for that?

There is an interesting game theory explanation.

Having the opposite handedness of most other people (i.e. being left-handed) is an advantage in a fight. That's because righties are used to fight against other righties because most people are righties, lefties are also used to fight against other righties. It means that when a lefty fights a righty, the lefty is in a familiar situation while the righty is not, giving the lefty an advantage. And indeed, in many sports where you have an opponent, at high level, there is a higher than normal proportion of lefties.

On the other hand (pun not intended), having the same handedness as most other people (i.e. being right-handed) is an avantage for cooperation. For example, to righties can easily share a tool made for righties, but it will be awkward for a lefty.

So there are two opposing forces here: cooperation tends to make people of all the same handedness, while competition pushes for a 50/50 distribution. We are at about 90/10, suggesting that the cooperation aspect is more important but not absolutely so.

That dominant side is the right side is probably just due to random chance. That it doesn't differ between population groups suggest that it happened before humans spread around the globe, possibly before humans were human.

"It's complicated."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handedness#Causes

AFAIK the left/right hemisphere division is extremely complicated and cannot be reduced to being responsible for different activities.

Probably the same reason why most biomolecules are chiral, i.e. having left and right side.

Last time I read about this, I think some physicist said something about the rotation of elementary particles and radiation stuff that are way over my head.

I doubt that, as we left-handers are made up of the same sort of molecule as everybody else.

Because left and right change depending on which way you're looking at?

Oh wow, so RV's use the "starboard" side for loading. lol

Maybe connected, that air vessels today are also boarded from the left.

And now with the origin story, I won’t forget which is which.

That was a great explanation thanks for posting

It's fairly natural to me that port is left but that is only because I've spent quite a bit of time on boats + attaining relevant certificates.

Port and left both have 4 letters.

I'm trying to learn my 2y old kid "left" and "right". It's hard.

position: absolute Vs position: relative

Interesting though the Americans swapped the colours guiding you in a channel but the names have never been flipped.

same reason I use cardinal directions when giving directions, I'm guessing

"Driver" and "passenger" side for cars. Oh wait, doesn't work in England etc.

I guess for ships there is no variation between countries? Starboard is presumably where the wheel was so everyone must have left it on the right side?

It still works just as well in England...

Things that are driver-side in the U.S. are also driver-side in England, because the layout is designed around the position of the driver.

"Starboard" comes from Old English "steor bord", which meant "steering side of the boat" back in the days when a steering oar was used to steer the boat. Most sailors were right-handed so this was almost always the right side. It was easier to dock with the other side of the boat facing the port, so the left side became "larboard" and then simply "port." English is the international nautical language owing to its centuries of dominance of the oceans, followed by the U.S. dominance of global politics, so the English terms became the standard nautical terms. (Note: technically the international nautical language is "Seaspeak," which is a special dialect of English created specifically for nautical use.)

Having grown up in a large transit-oriented city, I learned to drive as a grownup. I really struggled with the concept of reversing. "Turn the wheel left!" "You just turn the wheel the way you want the _back_ of the car to go." "No, the other left!"

At this point I was still limited to driving in empty 1000 space parking lots and was getting frustrated. One day I realized, I could ask my driving companion-turned-instructor "hey when you say left and right, can you just say passenger-side or driver-side?" After a few iterations at this, it all clicked. My new-driver brain could do absolute positioning consistently with minimal effort, instead of having to calculate relative positioning each time and getting frazzled.

> Starboard is presumably where the wheel was

Not the wheel, but (as this article also says) the steering oar. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steering_oar:

“The steering oar or steering board is an over-sized oar or board, to control the direction of a ship or other watercraft prior to the invention of the rudder.“

I've always assumed that "driver" and "passenger" were simply reversed for England, etc.

I'd reverse it for postal trucks, after all, or cars imported from England and such.

In the UK the (possibly?) more common terms are nearside (kerb side) and offside (road side).

It's maybe better than "driver" and "passenger side" because it still makes sense when you're driving a car with different "handedness" to your current road network.

Right, that was my point. The article says that port/starboard is used because left/right is confusing depending on the direction. But unlike ships cars have the driver side right or left so it's not that useful.

"Left side" and "right side" is unambiguous, because there is one given direction (forward). It is the same as "left bank" and "right bank" of a river (it is always looking downstream). For example, Slavic languages usually just use some sort of "left side" and "right side".

it's unambiguous if you know you're talking about direction relative to the boat, but you don't know that you're talking about direction relative to the boat.

your left hand is still your left hand, even if it's on the starboard side of the boat. you always need some additional disambiguation to specify that you're talking about the boat. i've never sailed a boat with slavic people, but i'm guessing they use a phrase like "boat left" and "boat right", not just "left" or "right".

also, i've never heard anybody describe a riverbank as "left" or "right". riverbanks would be described by their cardinal direction, like the "east bank" or the "south bank"

The left bank of the Seine is quite iconic!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rive_Gauche

They should get rid of these terms, as they are distracting.

A big part of the training material for boating license is about learning things that people are not using in practice, which makes less time / mental power to learn what is really important to survive and avoid crash (what's really important).

They are not distracting. There are many intense situations on a boat, and a crew is required to cooperate in order to survive. This means you must have extremely precise wording to quickly explain what needs to be done. This vocabulary is important for this reason, and is able to sharpen focus, rather than distract.

It requires a process of learning, and that is intentional.

If you look at statistics, most deaths occur in small boats with a crew who have no idea what these words mean, because they don't have a license.

These are the most common reason of fatalities:

- Not wearing a lifejacket or PFD.

- Falling overboard.

- Capsizing, swamping, sinking, or running aground.

- Being involved in a collision.

- Operating a pleasure craft while under the influence of alcohol or drugs.

The goal of the license should be helping these people, not experienced ones, who anyways have more advanced license, not just the basic ones.

In English "right" is one syllable and "starboard" is two. All things considered, using right/left is more concise. If you are aware enough of your orientation on a boat to know where port and starboard are located, you are also aware enough to know where left and right are located.

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