EXPLANATION The word ship refers to one ship, a single ship. Thus we say that the word ship is singular. If we wish to talk about more than one ship, we simply add an s to ship to make ships. We say that ships is the plural form of ship.
Be careful not to confuse plural words with possessive words. Notice the difference between these two sentences:
- There are five ships on the harbour. (The word ships is plural.)
- The ship’s captain came ashore. (Here the word ship is singular. The apostrophe shows that it is also possessive.)
Of course, a ship cannot own anything. When we talk about possession, it is just describing a grammatical relationship between two nouns. Some more examples are: the horse’s bridle, the school’s students, the car’s top speed. We know that a horse doesn’t own a bridle, the school doesn’t own the students and a car doesn’t own a top speed; we are really using the possessive form as short-hand for the top speed of the car, etc.
So possession and plurals are different. Plural words are made plural by the addition of an s (e.g. ships) but possession is shown by adding ’s (e.g. the ship’s captain).