Definition of "pocket battleship" []

• Any of several German warships built in the late 1920s and early 1930s that were smaller, less well armed, and less heavily armored than a conventional battleship. (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.

• "Since radar, aircraft and U-boats revolutionised naval warfare a few months afterwards, the unexpected entry of the pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee into the uncer - tain sanctuary of Montevideo harbour severed the link between the tactics which stemmed from Nelson and those employed after 1940."
• "For Raeder it meant almost a free hand to go ahead with his plans for building up the Navy — at that time it was still under the strength allowed by the Treaty of Versailles, having six new light cruisers, twenty-four torpedo boats, the pocket battleship Deutschland completed and her sister ships Admiral Scheer and Admiral Graf Spee building."
• "In December 1939, early in World War II, the German pocket battleship Graf Spee, a formidable ship armed with six 11-inch and eight 5. 9-inch guns, encountered three smaller British cruisers, which among them carried six 8-inch and sixteen 6-inch guns."