Bilge
lowest compartment on a ship or seaplane
The bilge (pronounced as ) of a ship or boat is the part of the hull that would rest on the ground if the vessel were unsupported by water. The "turn of the bilge" is the transition from the bottom of a hull to the sides of a hull.
Internally, the bilges (usually used in the plural in this context) is the lowest compartment on a ship or seaplane, on either side of the keel and (in a traditional wooden vessel) between the floors.
The first known use of the word is from 1513.
Bilge water
The word is sometimes also used to describe the water that collects in this area. Water that does not drain off the side of the deck or through a hole in the hull, which it would typically do via a scupper, instead drains down into the ship into the bilge. This water may be from rough seas, rain, leaks in the hull or stuffing box, or other interior spillage. The collected water must be pumped out to prevent the bilge from becoming too full and threatening to sink the ship.
Bilge water can be found aboard almost every vessel. Depending on the ship's design and function, bilge water may contain water, oil, urine, detergents, solvents, chemicals, pitch, particles, and other materials.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Bilge” is lowest compartment on a ship or seaplane. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Bilge, lowest and compartment, not as a finished interpretation.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jan 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1552868. The first chronological checks are 1513.
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This entry incorporates text from “Bilge” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.