- 1蒸汽船、輪船。「輪船」是台灣最自然的講法，來自早期的明輪；現代船其實燒柴油，所以講到 steamship 多半是在講十九、二十世紀的歷史。
A big ship driven by a steam engine. Coal or oil heats water, the steam turns the engine, and the engine turns a wheel or a . Before these ships, big boats crossed the sea using sails and wind, which meant you left when the wind allowed and arrived whenever you arrived. Steamships changed that: for the first time a ship could keep a . So the word carries a whole period of history with it — roughly the 1800s up to the middle of the 1900s, ocean crossings, immigrants, mail, the Titanic. That is why you meet the word mostly in history books, museums and old company names, not at a modern harbour. Today's ships run on diesel engines, and we just say ship. If you hear steamship now, it is usually somebody talking about the past, or a name that stuck: a shipping company founded a hundred years ago may still have Steamship in its title even though it has not burned a lump of coal in decades. In writing it is often to SS before a ship's name.
組成steam + ship. Two plain everyday words joined together, and the meaning is exactly the sum of them: a ship that runs on steam. English builds a lot of transport words this way.
同家族的字
- steamboatsame steam, but boat — usually a smaller one on a river, like the old boats on the Mississippi
- steam enginethe machine inside a steamship that makes it go
- shipyardshares ship — the place where a ship like this is built
- steampunkshares steam, and borrows the whole feeling of this age of machines
原始詞典資料1 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，摘錄並精簡格式，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
steamshipnoun/ˈstimˌʃɪp/
- 1
A ship or vessel propelled by steam power.
- Steamship arrivals, however, are less predictable and the best arrangements of shipping companies and the railway operating department may be upset by weather and tide.
- The shipwreck is the earliest examples yet found of a propeller-driven steamship on the Great Lakes.
摘錄自 英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary，已精簡格式；依 CC BY-SA 4.0 授權使用，改動後的內容同樣以此授權提供。