A ship is a romantic pairing of characters that a fan supports or enjoys imagining, and shipping is the activity of supporting one. Short for "relationship," the term covers canon couples, hinted pairings, and purely fan-invented ones alike.
Shipping is a creative act disguised as an opinion. To ship two characters is to want their relationship, and the fandom builds around that want: fiction, art, essays marshaling evidence, and names for the pairing itself, often a blend of the two names. A ship can be canon, hinted, or cheerfully impossible, and its popularity owes nothing to its probability.
The word's history runs through 1990s television fandom, where relationshippers shortened to shippers, and anime fandom adopted the whole toolkit. Ship wars, the organized fighting between rival pairings, are the practice's famous pathology: entertaining from a distance, corrosive up close, and built on treating speculation as territory.
This site's line is structural. Quizzes test canon facts: who did what, in which canon, full stop. Pairing speculation is never an answer, a stem, or a joke in our content, because a ship is an opinion a fan holds, not a fact a quiz can grade. The glossary defines the word so readers can follow fandom conversation; the quizzes stay out of it.
In use"Two rivals who have never shared a kind word have one of the fandom's largest ships, built entirely on fan work."