Shear

How to spell shear

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce shear

What does shear mean?

1. verbTo cut the wool or fleece from a sheep, or to clip something with a blade.
2. verbTo break or snap apart under a sideways force, especially of metal fasteners.
3. nounA force or stress that makes adjacent layers of a material slide against one another.

Shear in a sentence

• verb

  The farmers shear their flock every spring before the warm weather arrives.

• verb

  A sudden jolt can shear the bolts clean off the bracket.

• noun

  The engineers measured the shear stress acting on each rivet in the joint.

• verb

  Skilled hands can shear a single sheep in under two minutes.

• verb

  The steel pin will shear if the load exceeds its rating.

• noun

  Wind shear at altitude can make the landing far more difficult for pilots.

Where does shear come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word descends from the Old English verb sceran, which meant simply 'to cut' or 'to clip', and it goes back to a shared Germanic root that also produced the modern words 'shirt', 'short', and 'shore', all of which carry the underlying idea of something cut off or cut down. For centuries its most everyday use has been the clipping of wool from sheep, and the cutting tool we call 'shears' is a direct relative. Engineers and geologists later borrowed the word for forces that make one layer of material slide against another, as if being sliced apart. Its spelling trap is the homophone 'sheer', meaning steep, utter, or thin and transparent; the two words look almost identical but come from different roots, and 'shear' is the one that always involves cutting. Keeping the cutting idea in mind is the surest way to choose the 'ea' spelling correctly.

How the word is built

• shear (from Old English sceran: to cut, clip)

Words that sound like shear

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• sheer: Used to emphasise the pure or absolute degree of something, with nothing else involved.