Definition of Shipwreck

Shipwreck

The breaking in pieces, or shattering, of a ship or other vessel by being cast ashore or driven against rocks, shoals, etc., by the violence of the winds and waves.

A ship wrecked or destroyed upon the water, or the parts of such a ship; wreckage.

Fig.: Destruction; ruin; irretrievable loss.

To destroy, as a ship at sea, by running ashore or on rocks or sandbanks, or by the force of wind and waves in a tempest.

To cause to experience shipwreck, as sailors or passengers. Hence, to cause to suffer some disaster or loss; to destroy or ruin, as if by shipwreck; to wreck; as, to shipwreck a business.

Related Definitions:

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Shipwreck Quotations

When I die, it will be a shipwreck, and as when a huge ship sinks, many people all around will be sucked down with it.
Pablo Picasso

Antiquities are history defaced, or some remnants of history which have casually escaped the shipwreck of time.
Francis Bacon

Old age is a shipwreck.
Charles de Gaulle

The man who has experienced shipwreck shudders even at a calm sea.
Ovid

When kindness has left people, even for a few moments, we become afraid of them as if their reason had left them. When it has left a place where we have always found it, it is like shipwreck; we drop from security into something malevolent and bottomless.
Willa Cather

The channel is known only to the natives; so that if any stranger should enter into the bay without one of their pilots he would run great danger of shipwreck.
Thomas More

It is better to meet danger than to wait for it. He that is on a lee shore, and foresees a hurricane, stands out to sea and encounters a storm to avoid a shipwreck.
Charles Caleb Colton

We poison our lives with fear of burglary and shipwreck, and, ask anyone, the house is never burgled, and the ship never goes down.
Jean Anouilh

They make glorious shipwreck who are lost in seeking worlds.
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

Every government has as much of a duty to avoid war as a ship's captain has to avoid a shipwreck.
Guy de Maupassant

I didn't lead a very wise life, myself, but it was a full one and a grown-up one. You come of age very quickly through shipwreck and disaster.
Philip Dunne

Lovers of literature will look for the remains of the golden treasure in that shipwreck on the bottom of the sea of criticism.
Josef Skvorecky

More Shipwreck Quotations

Shipwreck Translations

shipwreck in Dutch is schipbreuk
shipwreck in German is Schiffbruch

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