Shipped

How to spell shipped

7 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce shipped

What does shipped mean?

1. verbPast tense of ship: sent goods or items to a destination by post, freight or carrier.
2. verbInformally, supported or wished for a romantic relationship between two characters or people.

Shipped in a sentence

• The warehouse shipped the order the same afternoon it was placed.

• Fans of the show shipped the two leads long before the writers paired them up.

• My replacement laptop shipped from the depot on Monday.

• Online viewers shipped the rivals so hard that fan art flooded the forums.

Where does shipped come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The base word comes from the Old English scip, meaning a seagoing vessel, a thoroughly Germanic word with relatives across the North Sea languages such as Dutch schip and German Schiff. From the noun grew a verb meaning to put goods or people aboard a ship, recorded in English well before 1500. As trade moved off the water and onto roads, rails and air, the verb broadened to mean sending merchandise by any means, which is why a modern parcel is said to be shipped even when no boat is involved. The spelling trap is purely mechanical: ship ends in a single short vowel followed by a single consonant, so that consonant doubles before -ed, giving shipped rather than shiped. In recent decades the same verb gained an informal extra life, where to support a romantic pairing between two people is to say they are shipped, a clipped form of relationship.

How the word is built

• ship (Old English scip, vessel/to send)
• -p- (consonant doubled after a short stressed vowel)
• -ed (past tense suffix)