A shipwreck is what remains of a ship that has wrecked, either sunk or beached. Whatever the cause, a sunken ship or a wrecked ship is a physical example of the event: this explains why the two concepts are often overlapping in English.
The United Nations estimates that there are more than 3 million shipwrecks on the ocean floor.
Read more about Shipwreck: Types of Shipwrecks, Causes, State of Preservation, Salvage of Wrecks
Famous quotes containing the word shipwreck:
“For the bright side of the painting I had a limited sympathy. My visions were of shipwreck and famine; of death or captivity among barbarian hordes; of a lifetime dragged out in sorrow and tears, upon some gray and desolate rock, in an ocean unapproachable and unknown.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)
“The man who has experienced shipwreck shudders even at a calm sea.”
—Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso)
“Words convey the mental treasures of one period to the generations that follow; and laden with this, their precious freight, they sail safely across gulfs of time in which empires have suffered shipwreck and the languages of common life have sunk into oblivion.”
—Anonymous. Quoted in Richard Chevenix Trench, On the Study of Words, lecture 1 (1858)