ships callings

[mjandrews96]

why are ships, planes etc always called she and not
he.. hope i am in the write place to ask this question

[B00]

I found this, not much help but funny anyway.

"A boat is called a she because there's always a great deal of bustle around her...because there's usually a gang of men around...because she has waist and stays...because she takes a lot of paint to keep her looking good...because it's not the initial expense that breaks you, it's the upkeep...because she is all decked out...because it takes a good man to handle her right...because she shows her topside, hides her bottom and, when coming into port, always heads for the buoys."
: ................George Moses in Falmouth, Massachusetts

[Quizmonster]

In Old English, nouns still had gender...that is, they were masculine, feminine or neuter, just as they still are in German, for instance. When using appropriate pronouns, these would be he, she and it, respectively. When that system broke up, 'it' was used as the pronoun to refer to all nouns.
However, some things considered somehow especially masculine were still referred to as 'he' for a long time afterwards - eg mountains, oak-trees etc - and others were still referred to as 'she' - eg boats, carriages etc.
The use of 'she' for a ship, for example, is at least as old as the 14th century in �modern' English and it was the same in Roman times. This may have been because their ships were dedicated often to goddesses, who were possibly the first figureheads carved on ships' prows. Even before that, in the language of the ancient Babylonians, �boat' was a feminine word, just as it was in Biblical Hebrew. That means Noah's �ark' was a feminine word, as boat is today in Italian and Arabic. ( The French - typically! - have masculine ships and the Germans have neuter ones.) The answer to your question as to why ships etc are called �she' is, therefore, a combination of language-development and history.