Shatter

How to spell shatter

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce shatter

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does shatter mean?

1. verbTo break suddenly and violently into many small pieces, or to destroy something such as hopes or calm.

Shatter in a sentence

• A single stray cricket ball can shatter a greenhouse pane.

• The sudden redundancy news seemed to shatter her confidence overnight.

Where does shatter come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Shatter first appears in Middle English as schateren, meaning to dash or scatter into pieces, and it is closely tied to the word scatter, which describes throwing things widely apart; the two are essentially variant forms of the same underlying idea of fragments flying outward. The root is Germanic, and while the exact line of descent is debated, it sits among a family of words for breaking and dispersing found across the older Germanic languages. Over time shatter narrowed to mean breaking something brittle, like glass or ice, into many sharp pieces all at once. By the 1500s it had also taken on the figurative sense of destroying hopes, nerves, or composure. The doubled t in the spelling simply reflects the short, sharp vowel before the -er ending, the same pattern seen in scatter, batter, and clatter.

How the word is built

• shatter (Middle English schateren, to break suddenly into fragments)
• double -tt- before -er