ship out
Britishverb
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Leave, especially for a distant place, as in The transport planes carried troops shipping out to the Mediterranean . Although this usage originally meant “depart by ship,” the expression is no longer limited to that mode of travel. [c. 1900]
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Send, export, especially to a distant place, as in The factory shipped out many more orders last month . [Mid-1600s]
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Quit a job or be fired; see shape up , def. 3.
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
They were still quiet half an hour later, when they passed the SS Ithaka, the big rusted and broken-down ship out in the bay that had run aground in a storm in the 1960s and been stuck there ever since.
From Literature
As a young man, he’d manned the tail gun of a B-24 in World War II. Later, he lived at a retirement home less than a knot or so up the bay from the destroyer, and he could see the ship out the window whenever he looked up from his book.
From Salon
Charlie served at Fort Eustis, the transportation headquarters for the entire army, where all the soldiers would ship out for their assignments.
From Literature
He’d been too young to serve in World War II. He’d been hit with appendicitis just as he was about to ship out to the Korean War.
From Literature
That meant the ferry had to spend months in a dry dock, a narrow basin which is drained, leaving the ship out of the water and supported by blocks.
From BBC
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
