Starship

How to spell starship

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce starship

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does starship mean?

1. nounA large spacecraft, especially one imagined for travel between stars or planets.

Starship in a sentence

• The crew boarded the starship before the long journey to the outer colonies.

• The museum displayed a full scale model of the fictional starship from the television series.

Where does starship come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a transparent compound of two very old native English words. The first element, 'star', descends from the Old English 'steorra', meaning the bright points of light in the night sky, and it is related to the Latin 'stella' and the Greek 'aster', all reaching back to a shared ancient root for a star. The second element, 'ship', comes from the Old English 'scip', meaning a seagoing vessel. The word was coined in the twentieth century by science fiction writers who borrowed the imagery of ocean ships and applied it to imagined vessels that travel between the stars. Because both halves are spelled exactly as the familiar standalone words, the only spelling pitfall is remembering to join them with no space and no hyphen.

How the word is built

• star (the celestial body, from Old English steorra)
• ship (vessel, from Old English scip)