Shared

How to spell shared

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce shared

What does shared mean?

1. verbDivided something with others, or gave a portion of it to them, in the past.
2. adjectiveUsed, owned, or experienced jointly by more than one person.

Shared in a sentence

• verb

  The two colleagues shared the cost of the taxi from the airport.

• adjective

  The apartment has a shared kitchen and a private bathroom.

• verb

  She shared her notes with everyone before the exam.

• adjective

  Their success grew from a shared commitment to the project.

Where does shared come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The word goes back to the Old English noun 'scearu' or 'scaru', meaning a cutting, a division, or a portion that has been cut off, which is closely related to the verb 'sceran', the ancestor of modern 'shear'. The underlying idea was always one of dividing something into parts, so a 'share' was originally a piece separated from a larger whole. By the late Middle Ages the noun had given rise to a verb meaning to divide and apportion, and 'shared' is simply its regular past tense and past participle, formed by adding '-ed'. The same root survives in 'plowshare', the cutting blade of a plough, which preserves the literal sense of something that cuts and divides the earth. Because the base word ends in a silent 'e', that letter is dropped before '-ed', giving the clean spelling 'shared' rather than 'shareed'.

How the word is built

• share (a portion, a division)
• -ed (past tense / past participle suffix)