Other forms: ships, shipping, shipped
A ship is a large vessel that crosses seas with cargo or passengers. A container ship, board the ship, the ship sailed.
The rough rule at sea is that a ship can carry a boat and a boat cannot carry a ship. Ships are traditionally called she, which is fading. As a verb, to ship is to send goods, and in American commerce it means to send by any method at all. Note shipment, shipping, shipwreck; and when your ship comes in, meaning when you finally get rich, from waiting for a trading vessel to return.
1nounshipA large vessel that crosses seas with cargo or passengers.~98%
“The ship sailed across the Atlantic carrying cars and machines.”
2verbsendTo send goods somewhere.~2%
“The shop ships orders all over the world within three days.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 21 sentences found in the wild and placed 21 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
ship is a large vessel.
Old English scip descends from a Germanic root that may mean something split or hollowed — a dugout. The same root gives skiff and skipper, and the modern container ship is named after a hollowed log.
Proto-Indo-European
*skey-
Middle English
schip
English, today
ship
From Middle English schip. From Middle English chip, schepe, schip, schup, scip, scippe, ship, shup, ssip, from Old English sċip, sċyp, from Proto-West Germanic skip, from Proto-Germanic skipą (“ship; tub, vessel”), possibly from Proto-Indo-European skey- (“to split”). More at shift. 2
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA