warship

UK/ˈwɔːˌʃɪp/US/ˈwɔɹˌʃɪp/

nounB2+Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #8,561 of 15,258leans written

Other forms: warships

A warship is a vessel armed and built for battle. Launch a warship.

It is built round its weapons where a merchant ship is built round its cargo. A modern warship carries a crew a fraction of the size of one a century ago.

Definitions of warship

1nounwarshipA vessel armed and built for battle.B2+
“The warship spent more time in refit than at sea.”

warship is a ship.

Where it comes from

War plus ship, one of the plainest compounds in the language.

From war + ship.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

warship in the wild

The ironclad was developed as a result of the vulnerability of wooden warships to explosive and incendiary shells.
Ironclad warship
Unlike a merchant ship, which carries cargo, a warship typically carries only weapons, ammunition and supplies for its crew.
Warship
In wartime, the distinction between warships and merchant ships is often blurred.
Warship
Typically, the main armor belt covers the warship from its main deck down to some distance below the waterline.
Belt armor
The organization is the publisher of the quarterly magazine, Warship International; the journal is mainly about warships in the era of iron and steel.
International Naval Research Organization

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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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