Word.ws English Dictionary

meanship

meanship noun: instrumentality.

Noun

meanship (uncountable)

  1. Instrumentality.
    • This is one of the main values to be achieved throughout budget administration. Its use as a criterion of procedure enhances the meanship or instrumentality of the budget.1934, The Nation's Schools, volume 14, page 42
    • This concept of the meanship of business has no place for that type of business administration which, frequently having been made independent of educational administration, seeks to dictate to those concerned with the ultimate educational […]1935, New York State Education - Volume 22 - Page 488

Origin of meanship

From means + -ship. Plural forms assuming a singular form when used as the adjunct of a composed term is common; cf. ten-foot pole (not *ten-feet pole), pantleg (not *pantsleg), and stairwell (not *stairswell).

Questions about meanship

What does meanship mean?
Meanship means instrumentality.
What part of speech is meanship?
Meanship is a noun.

Words near meanship in the dictionary

  1. means to say
  2. means well
  3. means-test
  4. means-tested
  5. Meanses
  6. meanship
  7. meanspirited
  8. meanspiritedly
  9. meanspiritedness
  10. meanspo
  11. meant

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: meanship (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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Cite this entry: “meanship.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/meanship. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.