Web fiction
Shipping
The act of imagining, desiring or expressing interest in a romantic involvement between two or more fictional (or real) people.
Shipping is "the act of imagining, desiring, or expressing interest in a romantic involvement between two or more real or fictional people." The word comes from "relationship": X-Files fans who wanted Mulder and Scully together called themselves "relationshippers," later just "shippers," and the Oxford English Dictionary traces the noun to 1996. A ship is the pairing itself, to ship a couple is to root for it, a favorite is an OTP, "one true pairing," and community shorthand calls a confirmed pairing "sailed" and a ruled-out one "sunk."
For a writer, shipping is the audience's romance engine running by itself. The will-they-won't-they of a love triangle is a ship war staged inside one book, and how to write romance is largely the craft of deciding when the ship sails. Web-serial communities ship loudly in comments, which doubles as market research on which pairings readers are emotionally invested in.