raft

noun

1. A flat-bottomed craft able to float and drift on water, used for transport or as a waterborne platform.

   “They floated down the river on an inflatable raft”

2. (broadly)Any flattish thing, usually wooden, used in a similar fashion.

   “When George Stephenson built the Liverpool & Manchester Railway he encountered the same difficulty at Chat Moss and solved the problem by constructing a kind of raft made of brushwood that more or less floated on the surface of the bog. On this he placed as much firm soil as his raft could carry, when the operation was repeated, the first raft being thereby sunk with its load of solid earth, which was not displaced.”

   “Even though in a way you let him freeze to death in the water, because the way I see it... I agree. Y'know, I think he actually could have fitted on that bit of door. There was plenty of room on the raft. I know. I know, I know.”

3. A thick crowd of seabirds or sea mammals, particularly a group of penguins when in the water.

   “Pelicans, bills stuck forward, would gather in small rafts to move along in comical formation, before diving in unison […]”

4. (US)A collection of logs, fallen trees, etc. which obstructs navigation in a river.
5. (US, slang)A slice of toast.
6. A square array of sensors forming part of a large telescope.
7. A mass of congealed solids that forms on a consommé because of the protein in the egg white.
8. A large (but unspecified) number, a lot.

   “1977-1980, Lou Sullivan, personal diary, quoted in 2019, Ellis Martin, Zach Ozma (editors), We Both Laughed In Pleasure Pomeroy asked me a raft of factual-type questions (how old were you when you began menstruating? did you ever see your parents having intercourse? did you have many friends in high school? how was your relationship with your father?). It seemed he had a written questionnaire & checked off answers as I have them.”

   “Among those arrested was the grand master himself, Jacques de Molay, who found himself facing a raft of charges based on the specious evidence of former knights [...].”

   “The goals and entertainment dried up after the break as Wales made a raft of substitutions but, with more meaningful challenges to come, a capacity crowd at the Stok Racecourse appreciated the bigger picture with Croatia on the horizon.”

verb

1. (transitive)To convey on a raft.

   “For timber I imported pine logs from Manchuria, rafted them two hundred miles down the Yalu River, three hundred miles over the Yellow Sea, and twenty miles up the Tatung River, where a thirty-five-foot tide lifted the consignment to Pyongyang.”

2. (transitive)To make into a raft.
3. (intransitive)To travel by raft.
4. To dock (toolbars, etc.) so that they share horizontal or vertical space.

   “The ToolStripContainer provides built-in rafting and docking of ToolStrip, MenuStrip, and StatusStrip controls.”

5. (archaic, form-of, participle, past)simple past and past participle of reave

   “Colin Clout raft me of his brother”

name

1. (abbreviation, acronym, alt-of)Acronym of reliable, replicated, redundant, and fault-tolerant, a consensus algorithm.

   “For leader election only the reachable manager nodes are included for Raft consensus.”