shipmistress

shipmistress noun: a female shipmaster.

Noun

shipmistress (plural shipmistresses)

A female shipmaster.
- Women nowadays invade all professions. The other day we announced the death of a lady shipmaster—or shipmistress.1890 May 10, Seafaring, volume 4, number 81, page 14, column 3
- “In whole truth, Shipmistress,” Dagla added, “I don’t believe Morruchan wants your help.[…]”1969, Poul Anderson, Beyond the Beyond, Signet Books, page 93

“The Light illumine you and your vessels, Shipmistress, and send the winds to speed you all.”1996, Robert Jordan, A Crown of Swords (The Wheel of Time; book seven), Orbit, →ISBN, page 248:
I hope our shipmistress knows what she’s doing.2005, Juliet E. McKenna, Western Shore, Orbit, →ISBN, page 188:
He has gone to fetch our good shipmistress, but he says to begin the discussion without him.2008, Isobelle Carmody, The Stone Key, New York, N.Y.: Random House, →ISBN, page 319:
It could have easily been missed; Inviglio still had no idea how the shipmistress aboard the Defiance of Calth had found it.2015, Nick Kyme, Deathfire: Into the Ruinstorm, Black Library, →ISBN, page 45:

plural	shipmistresses

From ship + mistress.

What does shipmistress mean?: Shipmistress means a female shipmaster.
How do you use shipmistress in a sentence?: “The Light illumine you and your vessels, Shipmistress, and send the winds to speed you all.”
What part of speech is shipmistress?: Shipmistress is a noun.
What is the plural of shipmistress?: The plural of shipmistress is shipmistresses.

Adapted from Wiktionary: shipmistress (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: 2026-09-02

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