Word.ws English Dictionary

sinking ship

sinking ship noun: something which is doomed; an impending debacle; an ongoing disaster.

Noun

sinking ship (plural sinking ships)

  1. (idiomatic) Something which is doomed; an impending debacle; an ongoing disaster.
    • He said that […] Bella had been perfectly right to leave him, because he was a sinking ship, and deserved to be turned out penniless into the world.1910, Mary Roberts Rinehart, chapter 2, in When a Man Marries
    • […]you can play around with girls without being involved in meshes of sentiment, and you can do anything and be justified—and here am I with the brains to do everything, yet tied to the sinking ship of future matrimony.1920 April, F[rancis] Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise, New York, N.Y.: Charles Scribner’s Sons, →OCLC, book II (The Education of a Personage), page 255
    Synonyms:
    lost cause

sinking ship meaning in Bengali

sinking ship in Bengali

একটি আসন্ন বিপর্যয়, একটি চলমান দুর্যোগ

Examples of sinking ship in a sentence

  • My word, won't it be funny when there's no Tevershall pit working. […] And now the men say it's a sinking ship, and it's time they all got out.1928, D[avid] H[erbert] Lawrence, chapter IX, in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, [Germany?]: Privately printed, →OCLC:
  • [T]he only future for Syria is without the Assad political dynasty. […] The government is a sinking ship.2012 May 30, Haitham Maleh, “Opinion: A Peace Plan in Name Only”, in New York Times, retrieved 01 Aug 2012:

Synonyms of sinking ship

Forms of sinking ship

pluralsinking ships

Words formed from sinking ship

Questions about sinking ship

What does sinking ship mean?
Sinking ship means something which is doomed; an impending debacle; an ongoing disaster.
What is sinking ship in Bengali?
Sinking ship in Bengali is একটি আসন্ন বিপর্যয়, একটি চলমান দুর্যোগ. See Sinking ship meaning in Bengali.
How do you use sinking ship in a sentence?
My word, won't it be funny when there's no Tevershall pit working. […] And now the men say it's a sinking ship, and it's time they all got out.
What part of speech is sinking ship?
Sinking ship is a noun.
What is the plural of sinking ship?
The plural of sinking ship is sinking ships.

Words near sinking ship in the dictionary

  1. sinking fund
  2. sinking funds
  3. sinking heart
  4. sinking in
  5. sinking or swimming
  6. sinking ship
  7. sinking ships
  8. sinkings
  9. Sinkinson
  10. Sinkler
  11. Sinklers

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: sinking ship (page history and authors); sinking ship (Bengali Wiktionary) (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:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-au-sinking ship.ogg.

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