Literature published on the problem of ship slamming in waves is reviewed from the point of view of someone working at a ship research institute. Such an institute is confronted with rather practical questions regarding the acceptability of certain design parameters such as the acceptable amount of bow flare angle for use at sea. The importance of these questions is illustrated by noting that actual slamming or the presumed danger of slamming is the main reason for ship operators to reduce speed or to change heading. The review shows that such questions cannot yet be answered. The problem of the local effect of the impact is very complicated owing to the importance of air inclusions, bubbles in the water, compressibility of water and cavitation effects. Only a computational method properly including all these effects will give an accurate answer; also model tests will not be capable of doing this, if only because the methods to extrapolate the results of models to full scale are not yet developed. The problem of the global response of the ship to a wave impact is closer to being solved. A two-stage approach is proposed, consisting of a computational fluid dynamics method for individual impacts and an approximate method to be included in long-term simulations. However, to arrive at a realistic long-term distribution, one has to account for the seamanship of the captain; avoiding the worst conditions or adapting the ship speed and course has a large effect on the actual extremes. Research on this topic has hardly begun.