Word.ws English Dictionary

hell ships

hell ships is the plural of hell ship.

Meaning of hell ship

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.

Questions about hell ships

What is hell ships the plural of?
Hell ships is the plural of hell ship.

Words near hell ships in the dictionary

  1. hell or high water
  2. hell pig
  3. hell pigs
  4. hell realm
  5. hell ship
  6. hell ships
  7. hell strip
  8. hell strips
  9. hell to pay
  10. hell to the naw
  11. hell to the no

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: hell ships (page history and authors); 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.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “hell ships.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/hell_ships. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.