airship

nounB2+Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #10,026 of 15,258leans written

Other forms: airships

An airship is a powered aircraft kept up by lighter-than-air gas. A rigid airship, board the airship, an airship over the stadium.

It differs from a balloon in having engines and steering. The rigid ones died with the Hindenburg in 1937, which burned because it was filled with hydrogen; helium is safe but was under American export control at the time.

Definitions of airship

1nounairshipA powered aircraft kept up by lighter-than-air gas.B2+
“A huge silver airship floated slowly over the city, its engines humming.”

airship is an aircraft.

Where it comes from

Air plus ship, translating the German Luftschiff, from the early days of powered flight.

From air + ship.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

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airship in the wild

A Zeppelin is a type of rigid airship named after the German inventor Ferdinand von Zeppelin who pioneered rigid airship development at the beginning of the 20th century.
Zeppelin
The defeat of Germany in 1918 temporarily slowed the airship business.
Zeppelin
A blimp, less commonly called a non-rigid airship, is an airship (dirigible) without an internal structural framework or a keel.
Blimp
An airship, dirigible balloon or dirigible is a type of aerostat (lighter-than-air) aircraft that can navigate through the air flying under its own power.
Airship
Most airships built since the 1960s have used helium, though some have used hot air.
Airship

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

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