Shelves

How to spell shelves

7 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce shelves

What does shelves mean?

1. nounMore than one shelf; flat horizontal boards fixed to a wall or inside furniture for holding objects.
2. verbPlaces something on a shelf, or postpones a plan or decision indefinitely.

Shelves in a sentence

• noun

  The new shelves in the pantry hold all of our tinned food.

• verb

  The committee often shelves difficult proposals until the next financial year.

• noun

  Dust had gathered on the upper shelves of the bookcase.

• verb

  The librarian carefully shelves each returned book in its correct section.

Where does shelves come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the plural of 'shelf', a word of solid Germanic stock that traces back to Old English. It is closely related to the Middle Low German 'schelf', meaning a set of boards or a shelf, and to older roots suggesting something split or cleft from a larger piece of wood, since early shelves were simply flat planks. Middle English carried the word forward as 'shelfe' or 'schelfe', and by the late medieval period it had settled into its modern sense of a fixed board for storing or displaying objects. The plural follows the long-standing English habit of turning a final 'f' into 'v' before the ending, the same pattern seen in 'leaf' becoming 'leaves' and 'wolf' becoming 'wolves'. That f-to-v swap is exactly the spelling trap: writers who reason from the singular 'shelf' sometimes wrongly reach for 'shelfs'. From the noun grew the verb 'to shelve', meaning to place on a shelf or, by extension, to postpone, which gives the identical written form 'shelves' a second life as a verb.

How the word is built

• shelf (a flat board for storage)
• -es (plural, with the f changing to v before the ending)