Shaft

How to spell shaft

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce shaft

What does shaft mean?

1. nounA long, straight rod that forms the body or handle of a tool, arrow, or similar object.
2. nounA deep, narrow vertical passage, such as one for a mine, lift, or ventilation.
3. nounA rotating rod in an engine or machine that transmits power.
4. nounA narrow ray or beam, especially of light.

Shaft in a sentence

• The shaft of the golf club had cracked near the grip.

• The lift shaft ran the full height of the office tower.

• The drive shaft transfers power from the engine to the wheels.

• A shaft of sunlight fell across the dusty floor.

• Each arrow has a wooden shaft tipped with a metal point.

• Miners descended the shaft in a steel cage.

Where does shaft come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a native English word that goes all the way back to the Old English sceaft, meaning a long pole, staff, or the wooden body of a spear. It belongs to a broad Germanic family, with close relatives in the Old Norse skapt and the German Schaft, and the shared ancestral sense seems to have been something shaved or scraped straight, which fits the idea of a smoothed pole. From the basic notion of a straight rod the meaning branched out naturally over the centuries: the slender stem of an arrow, the long handle of a tool, the rotating rod that drives a machine, the vertical hole sunk into the earth of a mine, and even a narrow beam of light or a thrust of sound. The spelling has stayed remarkably stable, with the consonant cluster -ft preserved from its earliest written form, which is why the word looks so plainly Germanic on the page.

How the word is built

• shaft (single root from Old English sceaft: a pole or stem); no prefix or suffix