ship
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
Letters
4 characters
Language
English
word origin
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "ship", 4-letters, with pronunciation in International Phonetic Alphabet notation, etymology traced through Germanic and Romance roots where applicable, common misspelling variants catalogued from Hunspell error dictionaries, and usage frequency ranked against the top 100,000 English words in the Wordfreq corpus. PlainSpell covers English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and German spelling with confusable-pair detection that highlights visually and phonetically similar words. This entry for "ship" includes synonyms, antonyms, homophones, and cross-language translation pointers sourced from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org extract. Whether you are verifying the correct spelling of "ship" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
ship is aEnglishnoun. It means: A water-borne vessel generally larger than a boat. Pronounced /ʃɪp/. It ranks #1,254 in English word frequency. Often confused with SI and SP.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | ship |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /ʃɪp/ |
| Letters | 4 |
| Frequency rank | #1,254 |
| Misspellings tracked | 6 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for ship is 4 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ʃɪp/. Corpus data places it at rank #1,254 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 8 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 6 documented wrong-spelling variants for ship, with forms such as "hsip", "shhip", and "shipp". Each variant represents a distinct typo pattern that appears often enough in corpora to be worth flagging, typically a doubled-consonant error, a silent-letter drop, or a vowel substitution.It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "SI", "SP", "six", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *sek-? Proto-Indo-European *-éyti Proto-Indo-European *skey-der.? Proto-Germanic *skipą Proto-West Germanic *skip Old English scip Middle English schip English ship From Middle English ship, schip, from Old English sċip, f… Root origin matters for spelling because borrowed morphemes (Greek, Latin, Old French, Old English) carry their source-language orthographic conventions into modern English, which is why historical etymology is often the cleanest predictor of whether a cluster like "-ough", "-eau", or "-tion" will appear. For readers arriving here from a spelling check, the authoritative guidance is: the correct English form is ship, spelled S-H-I-P, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1A water-borne vessel generally larger than a boat.
- 2A vessel which travels through any medium other than across land, such as an airship or spaceship.
- 3A spaceship.
- 4A particular still life consisting of an empty cell surrounded by six live cells.
- 5A sailing vessel with three or more square-rigged masts.
- 6A dish or utensil (originally fashioned like the hull of a ship) used to hold incense.
- 7The third card of the Lenormand deck.
- 8An aircraft.
Etymology
Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *sek-? Proto-Indo-European *-éyti Proto-Indo-European *skey-der.? Proto-Germanic *skipą Proto-West Germanic *skip Old English scip Middle English schip English ship From Middle English ship, schip, from Old English sċip, from Proto-West Germanic *skip, from Proto-Germanic *skipą, from Proto-Indo-European *skēyb-, *skib-. More at shift. Cognates Cognate with West Frisian skip, Dutch schip, German Schiff, Yiddish שיף (shif), Danish skib, Norwegian skip, Swedish skepp. Related also to Lithuanian skiẽbti (“to rip up”), Latvian škibît (“to cut, lop”). Compare typologically boat, from Proto-Indo-European *bʰeyd-.
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: hsip,shhip,shipp,shpi,sihp,sship
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for ship
Misspelling Variants of "ship"
Frequency rank: #1,254 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter S in our English index: