Ship versus boat
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
✎ This article/section is a stub — some half-sorted notes, not necessarily checked, not necessarily correct. Feel free to ignore, or tell me about it.
Every now and then you'll hear someone nag about that something is a ship, not a boat.
I wanted to know.
Turns out it's one of those rule-of-thumb-with-fuzziness-and-exceptions things.
The simplest answer is that it's about size
Everything small - rubber boats, canoos, rowboats, lifeboats - are boats by any definition.
Pretty much everything huge is a ship, by most definitions and by most pragmatics.
It's more shippy if
- it has a captain
- it can carry a boat, e.g. a lifeboat
- it has multiple decks
- larger:
- in sailing, one definition of a ship a "square-rigged craft with at least three masts, and a boat isn't" (where square-rigged basically means multiple sails per mast)
- large and motorized: "a ship is a large vessel intended for oceangoing or deep-water transport, and a boat is anything else"
It's more boaty if
- it couldn't carry a boat(/ship)
- it has just one deck
For things inbetween, a good rule of thumb is that
- It's easily a ship if it can carry a boat, e.g. a lifeboat, while
- a boat cannot carry a ship.
and yet there are still exceptions, including:
- submarines are considered boats, apparently on account of the single deck of the first generations of their designs, even though there are now many variants with more than one deck
- yet e.g. the US typically calls USS Something, where USS means United States Ship.
- but not everyone agrees on this one in the first place
- ferries are considered boats, even though they typically have lifeboats, and now typically have multiple decks
- this may be because the first ferries were tiny things like cable ferries which were barely more than rafts.
- commercial fishing craft are typically large enough to be safe on a wilder sea, and carry lifeboats, but are typically called boats (perhaps because of the large main deck?)
So yes, boats can have captains too.
A ship's captain will probably get annoyed if you call it a boat.
A boat's captain might merely correct you if you call it a ship.
See also: