Meaning
Fandom slang for endorsing or hoping for a romantic pairing between two fictional characters or, more riskily, real people; a ship is the pairing itself, a shipper is a fan who supports it, and to ship means to back the pairing. Informal and strongest in online fan communities, but increasingly general, as in I ship them. Applied to real people it shades into speculation about their private lives. Informal fandom slang; playful about fiction but potentially invasive when aimed at real people. Regional use: General English; strongest in online fandom.
Origin
The practice long predates the word: Star Trek fan fiction pairing Kirk and Spock gave rise to slash fiction in the mid-1970s. The word itself emerged around 1995 among online X-Files fans who wanted Mulder and Scully together and called themselves relationshippers, soon shortened to R'shipper and then shipper. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the noun ship and the noun shipper are first recorded in 1996 in Usenet posts on alt.tv.x-files, shipping in 1997, and the verb to ship in 1998. Merriam-Webster has since tracked the romantic sense of ship in its Words We're Watching series, while the surrounding fan vocabulary grew to include OTP for a favourite pairing and terms for pairings that sank or sailed. Exactly who first shortened relationshipper is unrecorded.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- relationshipper
- ship
- shipper
Usage Examples
- I have shipped those two characters since the second season.
- The fandom split into camps, each shipping a different pairing.
- Shipping real-life colleagues can turn awkward when they find out.