battlecruiser
Pluralbattlecruisers
- 1A fast warship carrying heavier guns and more armor than an ordinary cruiser, but less protected than a battleship, built to scout ahead of the fleet and hunt enemy cruisers.
Like a sports car fitted with a cannon: quick and powerful, but with little to shield it.
At Jutland, a British battlecruiser blew apart after a shell pierced its thin deck armor.
Each battlecruiser traded protection for speed, racing ahead of the battle fleet it scouted for.
Similarsupercruiser
Note
A blend of battleship and cruiser, and the name describes the compromise: a cruiser's speed with something close to a battleship's punch, bought by giving up armor. The US Navy reserved the hull symbol CC for the type but used it only for the Lexington class, which was canceled. Supercruiser, cruiser-killer and large cruiser name the same idea, while the looser in-between warship stretches the term to any ship between heavy cruiser and battleship.
- 2A warship that falls between a heavy cruiser and a light battleship in size, capability, or both.
Like a middleweight boxer, sitting between the lightweights and the heavyweights.
The admiral positioned her flagship battlecruiser between the cruiser screen and the battleships.
In the game, a single battlecruiser can crush a squadron of light cruisers but still loses to a battleship.
Note
Fiction borrowed the word as a rung on a ladder of ship sizes, between the heavy cruiser and the battleship. Here it marks a place in the hierarchy rather than a design trade-off, so nothing implies the thin armor of the historical warship. A fictional battlecruiser may be heavily protected. What defines it is that it outguns cruisers and gives way to battleships.
- 3A pub or public house; a place where people gather to drink.
He spent every Friday evening at the battlecruiser with his friends.
They pulled her out of the battlecruiser well past closing time.
Similarpub, boozer, bar, tavern
Note
Cockney rhyming slang at work: the warship's name is borrowed because cruiser rhymes with boozer, itself slang for a pub. It belongs to Cockney speech rather than general English, and to an outsider it reads like code. Steve Wilson's The Twelve Doors of Christmas Avenue (2014) treats it as part of a new language to learn and writes it as two words, battle cruiser. Learners will usually want to recognize it rather than use it.
Practice
Can you tell the meanings of battlecruiser apart? Answer 4 quick questions from this page, or write your own sentence and AI will check it.
Origin
A blend of "battleship" and "cruiser," reflecting a cruiser-like ship with battleship-like capabilities, possibly also from operating in the battleline.