"whatever floats your boat" meaning in English

See whatever floats your boat in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Interjection

Audio: En-au-whatever floats your boat.ogg [Australia]
Etymology: https://english.stackexchange.com/a/532095 The earliest evidence hints that figurative use of the phrase 'whatever floats your boat' originated among pleasure boaters in the USA. The (paywalled) Tampa Bay Times (St. Petersburg, Florida, p. 142) of 23 Sep 1979 offers a lengthy article about outfitting pleasure sailboats that ends with this advice (emphasis added): You are the ultimate interior decorator for your boat. Remember there are no hard and fast rules, just go with whatever floats your boat. Head templates: {{en-interj}} whatever floats your boat
  1. (idiomatic) Do whatever makes you happy or stimulates you. Tags: idiomatic Synonyms: suit yourself Related terms: float someone's boat, you do you
    Sense id: en-whatever_floats_your_boat-en-intj-bNEee5vr Categories (other): English entries with incorrect language header

Download JSON data for whatever floats your boat meaning in English (1.6kB)

{
  "etymology_text": "https://english.stackexchange.com/a/532095\nThe earliest evidence hints that figurative use of the phrase 'whatever floats your boat' originated among pleasure boaters in the USA. The (paywalled) Tampa Bay Times (St. Petersburg, Florida, p. 142) of 23 Sep 1979 offers a lengthy article about outfitting pleasure sailboats that ends with this advice (emphasis added):\nYou are the ultimate interior decorator for your boat. Remember there are no hard and fast rules, just go with whatever floats your boat.",
  "head_templates": [
    {
      "args": {},
      "expansion": "whatever floats your boat",
      "name": "en-interj"
    }
  ],
  "lang": "English",
  "lang_code": "en",
  "pos": "intj",
  "senses": [
    {
      "categories": [
        {
          "kind": "other",
          "name": "English entries with incorrect language header",
          "parents": [
            "Entries with incorrect language header",
            "Entry maintenance"
          ],
          "source": "w"
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "Do whatever makes you happy or stimulates you."
      ],
      "id": "en-whatever_floats_your_boat-en-intj-bNEee5vr",
      "links": [
        [
          "happy",
          "happy"
        ]
      ],
      "raw_glosses": [
        "(idiomatic) Do whatever makes you happy or stimulates you."
      ],
      "related": [
        {
          "word": "float someone's boat"
        },
        {
          "word": "you do you"
        }
      ],
      "synonyms": [
        {
          "word": "suit yourself"
        }
      ],
      "tags": [
        "idiomatic"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "sounds": [
    {
      "audio": "En-au-whatever floats your boat.ogg",
      "mp3_url": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/transcoded/a/a3/En-au-whatever_floats_your_boat.ogg/En-au-whatever_floats_your_boat.ogg.mp3",
      "ogg_url": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a3/En-au-whatever_floats_your_boat.ogg",
      "tags": [
        "Australia"
      ],
      "text": "Audio (AU)"
    }
  ],
  "word": "whatever floats your boat"
}
{
  "etymology_text": "https://english.stackexchange.com/a/532095\nThe earliest evidence hints that figurative use of the phrase 'whatever floats your boat' originated among pleasure boaters in the USA. The (paywalled) Tampa Bay Times (St. Petersburg, Florida, p. 142) of 23 Sep 1979 offers a lengthy article about outfitting pleasure sailboats that ends with this advice (emphasis added):\nYou are the ultimate interior decorator for your boat. Remember there are no hard and fast rules, just go with whatever floats your boat.",
  "head_templates": [
    {
      "args": {},
      "expansion": "whatever floats your boat",
      "name": "en-interj"
    }
  ],
  "lang": "English",
  "lang_code": "en",
  "pos": "intj",
  "related": [
    {
      "word": "float someone's boat"
    },
    {
      "word": "you do you"
    }
  ],
  "senses": [
    {
      "categories": [
        "English entries with incorrect language header",
        "English idioms",
        "English interjections",
        "English lemmas",
        "English multiword terms",
        "English terms with audio links"
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "Do whatever makes you happy or stimulates you."
      ],
      "links": [
        [
          "happy",
          "happy"
        ]
      ],
      "raw_glosses": [
        "(idiomatic) Do whatever makes you happy or stimulates you."
      ],
      "synonyms": [
        {
          "word": "suit yourself"
        }
      ],
      "tags": [
        "idiomatic"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "sounds": [
    {
      "audio": "En-au-whatever floats your boat.ogg",
      "mp3_url": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/transcoded/a/a3/En-au-whatever_floats_your_boat.ogg/En-au-whatever_floats_your_boat.ogg.mp3",
      "ogg_url": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a3/En-au-whatever_floats_your_boat.ogg",
      "tags": [
        "Australia"
      ],
      "text": "Audio (AU)"
    }
  ],
  "word": "whatever floats your boat"
}

This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-04-24 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-04-21 using wiktextract (82c8ff9 and f4967a5). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.

If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.