The term battleship comes from line-of-battle-ship or ship-of-the-line.

This basically means that a battleship is a large warship designed to fight other ships, and descends directly from the sailing ship-of-the-line via the ironclad.

The modern battleship started to show up in the mid to late 19^th century and was dominant until the 1940s, when somebody invented airplanes…

So, what’s the history here? What was the first ship of the line? And are they truly obsolete?