Definition of "warship" []

• A combat ship. Also called man-of-war. (noun)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "A U.S. warship is patrolling waters near Somalia to find a Japanese ship that was hijacked by pirates."
• "Nelson's Victory, the world's oldest commissioned warship, is indeed in Portsmouth, but it is not, as Hitchens says, "moored as a floating museum.""
• "In the past, ships could be held in reserve unmanned to be ready in emergency and further ships could be adapted from merchant vessels; today, the warship is too specialized for it to be effective from merchant ship conversion."