To be lost or abandoned. The term originally referred to falling or being thrown overboard (from a ship), without hope of recovery. The “board” was the ship’s side. This meaning dates from the seventeenth century, but by the mid-1800s the term had long since been transferred to anything lost. Longfellow still echoed the older meaning in his poem “The Wreck of the Hesperus” (1856): “Her rattling shrouds, all sheathed in ice, With the masts went by the board.”