[raft, rahft] 
| 1. | a more or less rigid floating platform made of buoyant material or materials: an inflatable rubber raft. |
| 2. | a collection of logs, planks, casks, etc., fastened together for floating on water. |
| 3. | life raft. |
| 4. | 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. |
| 5. | to transport on a raft. |
| 6. | to form (logs or the like) into a raft. |
| 7. | to travel or cross by raft. |
| 8. | (of an ice floe) to transport (embedded organic or rock debris) from the shore out to sea. |
| 9. | to use a raft; go or travel on a raft. |
| 10. | (of an ice floe) to overlap another ice floe. |
[raft, rahft] | a great quantity; a lot: a raft of trouble. |
| raft 1 (rāft) n.
v. tr.
To travel by raft. [Middle English, from Old Norse raptr, beam, rafter.] |
| raft 2 (rāft) n. Informal A great number, amount, or collection: "As the prairie dog goes, conservation biologists say, so may go a raft of other creatures" (William K. Stevens). [Alteration of dialectal raff, rubbish; see raffish.] |
raft
simplest type of watercraft, made up of logs or planks fastened together to form a floating platform. The earliest were sometimes made of bundles of reeds. Most rafts have been designed simply to float with the current, but they can be equipped with oars or sails or both and can be navigated in the ocean over long distances, as was dramatically demonstrated by Norwegian scientist Thor Heyerdahl in 1947; to test his theory that the Pacific islands might have been settled by people from South America, he sailed a large balsa raft, the Kon-Tiki, from Peru to islands near Tahiti in a voyage of three and a half months. The double-hulled catamarans of India are also seaworthy rafts.
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