There were two reasons why HMS Hood earned this particular moniker.

One, HMS Hood was one of the more prominent ships within the public face of the RN in the interwar period. When launched, she was among one of the largest and fastest capital ships in the world. One of the major duties of HMS Hood was to serve as the flagship for a number of prestigious assignments such as the head of the Home Fleet's battlecruiser squadron or as flagship of the Mediterranean Feet. This gave her a very high visibility both among the British public and the world. The height of this visibility was arguably the 1923-1924 world tour in which the Hood was the flagship of a RN fleet that visited numerous ports around the globe as a gesture of goodwill. She actually was at the time the largest ship to ever traverse the Panama Canal and a number of ports on the tour were not deep enough to accommodate her draft.

The second reason for HMS Hood's public visibility was that she had little other competition within the interwar RN for the spot. Although she was a battlecruiser, she was better armored in many respects than the Queen Elizabeth-class battleships and faster. The only other capital ships the UK constructed before the "battleship holiday" of the Washington Naval Treaty were the Nelson-class battleships. Although they had 16-inch guns and a decent armor scheme, they did not look like a battleship. They were squat, very slow (top speed was 23 knts), handled poorly, had an asymetiric main armament, and they looked like oilers with their aft-located superstructure. In short, HMS Hood beat its main rivals for being the most modern British battleship partly on aesthetic reasons. Hood's clean lines, rakish bow, and symmetrical superstructure all screamed "battleship" while the Nelsons appeared to be the compromised design they were.

The collapse of the naval limitation treaties did end the battleship holiday, but far too late for the RN. The King George V-class battleships began construction only at the end of the 1930s, so they would only be launched during the war. This meant these new ships had very little time to fix themselves in the public's eye. The advent of airpower and the gradual eclipse of the big guns as the main deciding factor in naval combat meant there was also not much for the King George Vs to do during the war. HMS Prince of Wales had a highly visible career, but as part of failed missions: Hood's attempt to stop the Bismarck where PoW was damaged, and as part of Force Z at Singapore where she was sunk along with HMS Repulse.