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St Petersburg Docks in the early morning smog.

A dock (from Dutch 'dok') is a man-made feature involved in the handling of boats or ships. However the exact meaning varies between different variants of the English language.

In British English, a dock is an enclosed area of water used for loading, unloading, building or repairing ships. Such a dock may be created by building enclosing harbour walls into an existing natural water space, or by excavation within what would otherwise be dry land.

There are two specific elaborations of the dock:

• Impounded docks are a variant in which the water is impounded either by dock gates or by a lock, thus allowing ships to remain afloat at low tide in places with high tidal ranges.
• Dry docks are a variant, also with dock gates, which can be emptied of water to allow investigation and maintenance of the underwater parts of ships.

A dockyard consists of one or more docks, usually with other structures.

Small wooden docks can be constructed with few tools and minimal materials.

In American English, a dock is technically synonymous with pier or wharf—any human-made structure in the water intended for people to be on. However, in modern use, pier is generally used to refer to structures originally intended for industrial use, such as seafood processing or shipping, and more recently for cruise ships, and dock is used for most everything else, often with a qualifier, such as ferry dock, swimming dock, etc. However, pier is also commonly used to refer to wooden or metal structures that extend into the ocean from beaches and are used, for the most part, to accommodate fishing in the ocean without using a boat.

In American English, the term for the water area between piers is 'slip'.

In the cottage country of Canada and the United States, a dock is a wooden platform built over water with one end secured to the shore. The platform is used for boarding and off loading small boats.

• harbor
• marina
• ski dock

• Marina Search - Find Marinas, Boat Slips and Marine Products & Services.
• Encyclopaedia Britannica, dry-dock

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