ship's company

noun

"ship-s-company" is a 12-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.

The verdict

“ship's company” is uncommon English (outside the top frequency list), classed as a noun. The kind of spelling people second-guess.

Unranked
below top-frequency English
14
letters

According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - The entire crew of a ship, including the officers

Corpus desk

Index EN-ship-s-company · ship's company · English

ship's company · unranked · 0 variants · 0 confusables

  • FREQ-UNRANKED Unranked
  • LEN-MEGA 14 letters
  • VOW-4 4 vowels
  • CONFUS-0 No pairs
  • VAR-0 0 variants
  • BOOK-THIN "S" thin
  • PHOTO-UNK Peer pending

Read with this headword: Spelling guide for this pattern

Desk codes from Wiktionary headword shape, FrequencyWords rank tier, confusable-pair count, generated misspelling depth, letter-cohort book size, and photo-finish peer. Not a difficulty grade.

Key facts for ship's company
PropertyValue
Headwordship's company
LanguageEnglish
Part of speechNoun
Letters14
Misspellings tracked0
Confusable pairs0
SourceWiktionary (kaikki.org)

Long-tail rank of “ship's company” in English

ship's companyranks outside the top 100,000 English headwords, in the long tail of specialist, archaic, or seldom-used vocabulary, exactly the territory where a reader stops mid-sentence to double-check spelling.

Beyond rank #100,000. Source: FrequencyWords open word-frequency list.

Rare enough to double-check

ship's company is uncommon English outside the top frequency list, classed as anoun. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. 2 senses are on record.

ship's company has no tracked misspelling variants, since its letter pattern doesn't lend itself to common typo substitutions. No confusable counterpart is on file for this word, suggesting its spelling stands apart enough that readers rarely confuse it with something else.

No borrowing history is documented for this entry, so spelling patterns must be inferred from the word's phoneme-to-grapheme mapping rather than from a documented borrowing chain. The correct English form is ship's company, spelled S-H-I-P-'-S- -C-O-M-P-A-N-Y.

Definition

  1. 1
    The entire crew of a ship, including the officers
  2. 2
    All of the occupants of a ship, including crew and passengers.

Recorded use

Wiktionary examples

These source excerpts show how ship's company appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.

  1. [T]he whole ship's company consisted of sixty-five men.
  2. [T]he regulations enjoin the attendance of the entire ship's company, from the corpulent Captain himself to the smallest boy who strikes the bell.

Definitions, pronunciation, and etymology for this entry are drawn from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org structured extract (CC BY-SA). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do you spell "ship's company"?
"ship's company" is spelled S-H-I-P-'-S- -C-O-M-P-A-N-Y.
What does "ship's company" mean?
As a noun, "ship's company" means: The entire crew of a ship, including the officers
What language does "ship's company" come from?
"ship's company" is a English word. PlainSpell covers definitions, pronunciations, and spelling data across English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and German.
Is PlainSpell free to use?
Yes, PlainSpell is a completely free word reference. You can look up definitions, pronunciations, confusable pairs, homophones, and spelling corrections across 5 languages without any sign-up or subscription.

Source: Wiktionary (via kaikki.org) Structured Wiktionary extract

Source: FrequencyWords open word-frequency list