spaceship
Americannoun
-
spaceships
plural
noun
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of spaceship
Explanation
A vehicle that travels outside the earth's atmosphere is a spaceship. If you want to walk around on the moon some day, you'll have to get there in a spaceship. Any craft that carries people or equipment through space is a spaceship, though you could also call it a "rocket ship." Traveling through the universe, far from Earth or just outside its atmosphere, definitely requires a spaceship. Spaceship was originally borrowed from 19th- and 20th-century science fiction, and even today the term is considered less scientific than spacecraft or space vehicle.
Vocabulary lists containing spaceship
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.
See Examples For:
Weir and a small crew are sent on a recovery mission after the lost spaceship, the Event Horizon, suddenly reappears in orbit around Neptune, issuing a distress signal.
From Salon ● Jul. 17, 2026
The spaceship traveled a little more than 62 miles above California’s Mojave Desert, as thousands of people watched from the ground.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 15, 2026
I didn’t need Dreyfuss to step off a spaceship gangplank and say, “I’m back.”
From Los Angeles Times ● Jun. 10, 2026
He reports a sighting of an unidentified object to Nasa mission control, describing a "bogey" and "trillions of little particles" seen to the left of the spaceship.
From BBC ● May 8, 2026
Sun Ra preaching about the “alter destiny” and “the living myth” and powering his spaceship with music—all over strange noises that sound more like a computer malfunctioning than jazz.
From "Boy21" by Matthew Quick
That money is definitely needed to get the company’s giant spaceships working and build out expensive data centers needed for artificial intelligence.
From The Wall Street Journal ● May 24, 2026
The restart of commercial missions with a mothership and two Delta spaceships opens up the potential for $450 million in annual revenue across 125 flights, analysts at Jefferies said.
From Barron's ● Apr. 6, 2026
Nominally designed as a spaceport, Lego aliens and spaceships populate the area.
From Los Angeles Times ● Mar. 6, 2026
The spaceships of the future—the ones we imagine, or design on paper—have the signature feature of never blowing up.
From Slate ● Dec. 9, 2025
On the second day after the space launch Big Ma said to JimmyTrotter, “Now, son, you’ve watched enough flying spaceships for today. I need to see my program.”
From "Gone Crazy in Alabama" by Rita Williams-Garcia
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.
