shipload

From ship +‎ load.

shipload (plural shiploads)

1. (nautical) The amount (of cargo) that a ship can carry.
   • 1853, John Ruskin, “IV, St. Mark's”, in The Stones of Venice, volume II (The Sea-Stories), London: Smith, Elder, and Co., […], →OCLC, § XXVII, page 77:

     It might, under all the circumstances above stated, have been a question with other builders, whether to import one shipload of costly jaspers, or twenty of chalk flints; and whether to build a small church faced with porphyry and paved with agate, or to raise a vast cathedral in freestone.

   • 1945 May and June, Charles E. Lee, “The Penrhyn Railway and its Locomotives—1”, in Railway Magazine, page 138:

     The Penrhyn slate quarry possibly dates back to the sixteenth century, as it appears that in 1580 Sion Tudor asked the Bishop of Bangor for a shipload of slate.

   • 1997, Thomas Pynchon, chapter 66, in Mason & Dixon, 1st US edition, New York: Henry Holt and Company, →ISBN, part Two: America, page 641:

     Alas, our shipload of Pelts, upon which we had borrow'd heavily, approaching the Channel, was surpriz'd by one of Monseer's Privateers and like that, ta'en.

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