kippage means those sailing together on a ship, both crew and passengers. It carries an Arena rating of 1466, earned across 38 head-to-head judged battles.
Among words judged in Lexicurio's Arena, kippage ranks #197 of 17,132 for Most Betrayed by Its Sound, #1,241 of 17,140 for Most Whimsical Words, #1,937 of 17,142 for Most Ingenious Words, #4,105 of 17,151 for The Improbable.
Why “kippage” is a great word
KIPPAGE — [Noun] A fit of temper or rage; also, a state of confusion or disorder arising from tumult. An aphetic form of the French équipage (“equipment, crew”), first attested in 1578, its sense shifting from a ship’s orderly gear to the tumultuous state of its crew. Unlike “tantrum,” which implies a childish, noisy outburst, or “disarray,” which denotes a simple state of untidiness, kippage evokes the specific, archaic unraveling of a once-ordered group. It is the overturned charts and shouted oaths in a ship’s cabin, the scattered aftermath of a slammed domestic door, the sudden scuffle in a market that spirals into a melee—the old, precise word for when human machinery breaks into a storm of its own making.
Etymology
Aphetic form of French équipage.
noun
- Those sailing together on a ship, both crew and passengers.e.g.“To find a kippage for a convict ship was no easy matter, for many a seaman would heave sharp about at the prospect of signing on to a vessel with a cargo of cutthroats.” — 2008, Amitav Ghosh, Sea of Poppies, Penguin, published 2015, page 76:
- Confusion, disorder.
- A fit of temper; rage.
Definitions & examples from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 3.0).
Words closest in meaning
By meaning, not spelling — each word's AI semantic fingerprint, nearest first.