Ship

How to spell ship

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce ship

What does ship mean?

1. nounA large boat designed to travel on the sea or other waters.
2. verbTo send or transport goods to a destination.

Ship in a sentence

• noun

  The cargo ship docked at the harbour just after dawn.

• verb

  The warehouse can ship your order the same day.

• noun

  Every passenger boarded the ship before it left port.

• verb

  They ship parts to factories across three continents.

Where does ship come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a thoroughly native English word, descending from the Old English scip, which meant a boat or vessel and was pronounced with the hard 'sk' sound that later softened to 'sh'. It traces back to a common Germanic root, seen in the Dutch schip and the German Schiff, all referring to a craft for travelling on water. The verb sense, meaning to put goods aboard a vessel and so to send them away, grew naturally out of the noun and was already in use by the late medieval period. In modern times the verb broadened far beyond the sea, so that a company can now ship a parcel by road or air just as easily as by water. The spelling is wonderfully regular, a simple consonant-vowel-consonant shape, which is why almost nobody stumbles over it.

How the word is built

• ship (from Old English scip: boat, vessel); no affixes