Shipping

How to spell shipping

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce shipping

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does shipping mean?

1. nounThe activity of transporting or delivering goods to a destination, or the charge made for doing so.
2. nounShips considered together, especially those using a particular port or belonging to a country.

Shipping in a sentence

• The online order included free shipping on purchases over fifty pounds.

• The storm closed the harbour to all shipping for two days.

• Delays in shipping left several warehouses waiting for stock.

• The canal handles a vast volume of commercial shipping each year.

Where does shipping come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The core word ship comes from the Old English scip, a native Germanic term for a seagoing vessel that has cousins across the Germanic languages, such as the Dutch schip and the German Schiff. From the noun grew a verb meaning to put goods or people aboard a vessel, and the gerund shipping was used from the late medieval period for the act of sending things by sea. As commerce expanded, the meaning broadened so that shipping no longer required an actual ship: today goods are said to be shipping when they travel by road, rail, or air as well. The spelling trap is the doubled p, which follows the standard English rule that a short stressed vowel before a single final consonant doubles that consonant when -ing is added, just as in stopping and running. The same root also survives in collective uses, where shipping can mean all the vessels of a port or nation taken together.

How the word is built

• ship (vessel/to send by ship)
• -ing (gerund/noun suffix; the p doubles because a single short vowel precedes the final consonant)