The nobby is an inshore sailing boat which was used as a traditional fishing boat around Lancashire and the Isle of Man. The Lancashire nobby originated in Morecambe Bay about 1840 and around Southport. It subsequently came into widespread use down the north west coast of England. The Manx nobby first appeared in the 1880s and was used around the Isle of Man. Many localities on the coast of Great Britain developed their own type of fishing boat adapted to local fishing and sea conditions, and the nobbies are examples of this.

The Lancashire nobby was primarily a shrimp trawler towing beam trawls sized for common brown shrimp (Crangon Vulgaris), pink shrimp (Pandalus montagui or Aesop prawn), or flatfish. The nobby ranged in size from about 25 to 32 feet (7.6 to 9.8 m) for single-handed boats and from 36 to 45 feet (11 to 14 m) for two-man boats. They were all pole masted cutters with gaff topsail.

In the north west of England the Morecambe Bay nobby emerged about 1840 as the local type. Houldsworth illustrated them as a sloop rigged craft with a square tuck stern A report in the Lancaster Gazette of 7 November 1840 indicates that Southport smacks were also fishing in Morecambe Bay, providing another progenitor of the nobby.

Nobby is the diminutive form of the name Norbert. It is also a nickname most commonly used in English for those with the surname Clark or Clarke.

The explanation given for the use of this nickname is that clerks (pronounced "clarks" in British English) in the City of London used to wear Nobby hats, a type of bowler hat. Alternative spellings include "Knobby" and "Clarke".

An alternative explanation for the name Nobby attached to the surname Clarke is thus: 16th century monks wrote letters for the illiterate. These monks were referred to as "Clerks". The outcome of so much writing causes calluses on the fingers "nobs" and therefore "Nobby Clerks" was born.

In England the term "nob" is used to refer to a member of the aristocracy and by extension a posh person. A clerk would deal with the common people but would be better educated, better paid and in a position of relative power. To the uneducated, clerks were posh and therefore considered to be "nobs". Hence, nobby Clark. Clerks were also required to maintain a high standard of dress, and were paid a clothing allowance. The result was that they always appeared smart. Both the Oxford English and the English Dialect Dictionaries list nobby as being of a rich man, a nob or toff, or “smart”, and gives it a wide distribution, so smart persons were "nobby".

A boat is a watercraft of any size designed to float or plane, to provide passage across water. Usually this water will be inland (lakes) or in protected coastal areas. However, boats such as the whaleboat were designed to be operated from a ship in an offshore environment. In naval terms, a boat is a vessel small enough to be carried aboard another vessel (a ship). Another less restrictive definition is a vessel that can be lifted out of the water. Strictly speaking and uniquely a submarine is a boat as defined by the Royal Navy^{[citation needed]}. Some boats too large for the naval definition include the Great Lakes freighter, riverboat, narrowboat and ferryboat. The term armed boat, used primarily by English speaking naval forces, referred to any boat carrying either a cannon or armed occupants, such as marines^{[citation needed]}.

Boats have served as short-distance transportation since early times. Circumstantial evidence, such as the early settlement of Australia over 40,000 years ago, and findings in Crete dated 130,000 years ago, suggests that boats have been used since ancient times. The earliest boats have been predicted to be logboats. The oldest boats to be found by archaeological excavation are logboats from around 7,000–10,000 years ago. The oldest recovered boat in the world is the Pesse canoe; it is a dugout or hollowed tree trunk from a Pinus sylvestris. It was constructed somewhere between 8200 and 7600 B.C. This canoe is exhibited in the Drents Museum in Assen, Netherlands; other very old dugout boats have been recovered. A 7,000 year-old seagoing boat made from reeds and tar has been found in Kuwait.