shipload

plural shiploads

1. nauticalThe amount (of cargo) that a ship can carry.

   Alas, our shipload of Pelts, upon which we had borrow'd heavily, approaching the Channel, was surpriz'd by one of Monseer's Privateers and like that, ta'en.

   1997, Thomas Pynchon, chapter 66, in Mason & Dixon, 1st US edition, New York: Henry Holt and Company, →ISBN, part Two: America, page 641

   2 more examples

   It might, under all the circumstances above stated, have been a question with other builders, whether to import one shipload of costly jaspers, or twenty of chalk flints; and whether to build a small church faced with porphyry and paved with agate, or to raise a vast cathedral in freestone.

   1853, John Ruskin, “IV, St. Mark's”, in The Stones of Venice, volume II (The Sea-Stories), London: Smith, Elder, and Co., […], →OCLC, § XXVII, page 77

   The Penrhyn slate quarry possibly dates back to the sixteenth century, as it appears that in 1580 Sion Tudor asked the Bishop of Bangor for a shipload of slate.

   1945 May and June, Charles E. Lee, “The Penrhyn Railway and its Locomotives—1”, in Railway Magazine, page 138

2. Minced oath of shitload.

   But, providing you have access to a shipload of coloured pencils and a naughty boy to sharpen them, they are a good and valid classroom method with a variety of applications.

   2006 April 18, Philip Beadle, “Mind maps: rubbish in theory, but handy in practice”, in The Guardian, →ISSN