a ship: a seagoing vessel
This is the ordinary Hebrew word for a ship, a boat built to travel the open sea rather than a river craft. It names the vessel itself, whether a single ship or, in the plural, a whole line of them.
Israel was not a seafaring nation, so ships turn up mostly at the edges of its story: in the sea trade King Solomon ran with Hiram of Tyre, in the recurring picture of the "ships of Tarshish" (a class of large ocean-going merchant vessel loaded with gold, silver, and cargo), and in poetry that marvels at boats gliding across waters no one can master. The one sustained sea adventure in the Old Testament, Jonah fleeing toward Tarshish, unfolds aboard one of these ships as a storm nearly tears it apart.
Because the vessel could carry great wealth and could also be smashed by a single east wind, the word often carries a double weight in the prophets: ships stand for the far-reaching commerce and pride of the nations, and their wreck stands for the sudden collapse of that pride.