Troopship

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A vessel used to transport soldiers from one place to another, usually across the sea
2. A ship chartered or built to carry military personnel and their equipment during a campaign or deployment
3. Any large seagoing craft that conveys an armed force of soldiers to a destination for military service

Etymology: "Troopship" is about as transparent as compounds get: it joins "troop", a body of soldiers, with "ship", a large vessel. The "troop" half is itself a borrowing, coming into English from French "troupe" (a company or band), which in turn descends from Late Latin "troppus", probably from a Germanic source related to the idea of a gathered flock or crowd. That makes the word a blend of two vocabularies, one Romance and one Germanic, joined in English as a plain description of a ship built or used to carry soldiers. The point of the compound is function rather than design. A troopship was simply any seagoing vessel pressed into carrying a military force, so the term describes a job a ship was doing, not a special class of hull. The second element, "ship", is an Old English word with ancestors across Germanic languages, meaning a large craft, and it has carried that sense without much change for over a thousand years.

Synonyms: troop carrier, transport ship