Word.ws English Dictionary

hell ship

hell ship noun: a ship (sailing vessel) with extremely inhumane living conditions or with a reputation for cruelty among the crew, especially one of those used by the Japanese to transport Allied prisoners of war and Asian slave labourers out of the Philippines, the Dutch East Indies, Hong Kong, and Singapore in World War II.

Noun

hell ship (plural hell ships)

  1. (historical) A ship (sailing vessel) with extremely inhumane living conditions or with a reputation for cruelty among the crew, especially one of those used by the Japanese to transport Allied prisoners of war and Asian slave labourers out of the Philippines, the Dutch East Indies, Hong Kong, and Singapore in World War II.

Forms of hell ship

pluralhell ships

Questions about hell ship

What does hell ship mean?
Hell ship means a ship (sailing vessel) with extremely inhumane living conditions or with a reputation for cruelty among the crew, especially one of those used by the Japanese to transport Allied prisoners of war and Asian slave labourers out of the Philippines, the Dutch East Indies, Hong Kong, and Singapore in World War II.
What part of speech is hell ship?
Hell ship is a noun.
What is the plural of hell ship?
The plural of hell ship is hell ships.

Words near hell ship in the dictionary

  1. hell on wheels
  2. hell or high water
  3. hell pig
  4. hell pigs
  5. hell realm
  6. hell ship
  7. hell ships
  8. hell strip
  9. hell strips
  10. hell to pay
  11. hell to the naw

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: hell ship (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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