Shipment

How to spell shipment

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce shipment

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does shipment mean?

1. nounA quantity of goods sent or transported together, or the act of sending them.

Shipment in a sentence

• The warehouse received a large shipment of furniture this morning.

• Customs delayed the shipment for almost two weeks.

Where does shipment come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word is a fairly modern coinage built from the verb 'ship' and the noun-forming suffix '-ment'. The verb 'ship' goes back to Old English 'scip', the word for a seagoing vessel, and originally meant literally to send goods aboard a ship. Over time the verb broadened to mean dispatching goods by any means, whether by sea, rail, road, or air. The suffix '-ment', borrowed into English from Latin 'mentum' by way of French, turns a verb into a noun naming the result or process of the action, so 'shipment' simply means the goods sent or the act of sending them. The word appears in English from the early 1800s, when expanding trade and commerce made a single tidy noun for dispatched goods genuinely useful. Its spelling is reassuringly regular: keep the whole verb 'ship' intact and add '-ment' with no letters dropped or doubled.

How the word is built

• ship (to send goods, originally to transport by ship)
• -ment (noun suffix forming the result or act)