shipkeeper
shipkeeper noun: a caretaker of a ship when its crew is away.
Noun
shipkeeper (plural shipkeepers)
- A caretaker of a ship when its crew is away.
- … and when the ship is like the one now in question, not being navigated, but laid up in dock, there is the additional possibility that the shipkeeper may be the servant of the dock company, or the ship's broker, or any one else with whom the owners may have made an arrangement to keep his ship for...1866, Max Robertson, editor, English Reports Annotated, volume 2, part 1, London: The Reports and Digest Syndicate, Ltd., pages 1986-1987
- In the sailing ship days practically every ship had a shipkeeper, usually some wheezy old pensioner who had at last been reluctantly driven to the admission that he was too old to go to sea.1925, C. Fox Smith, Ship Alley: More Sailor Town Days, Houghton Mifflin, page 188
Forms of shipkeeper
| plural | shipkeepers |
|---|
Origin of shipkeeper
From ship + keeper.
Questions about shipkeeper
- What does shipkeeper mean?
- Shipkeeper means a caretaker of a ship when its crew is away.
- What part of speech is shipkeeper?
- Shipkeeper is a noun.
- What is the plural of shipkeeper?
- The plural of shipkeeper is shipkeepers.
Words near shipkeeper in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: shipkeeper (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: “shipkeeper.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/shipkeeper. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.