Shire

How to spell shire

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce shire

What does shire mean?

1. nounA county or rural administrative district, especially one of the traditional English counties.
2. nounA very large, powerful breed of draught horse originally bred in the English midlands.

Shire in a sentence

• The old maps show every village within the shire.

• The brewery still uses a shire to pull its delivery cart at festivals.

• Local government reforms redrew the boundary of the shire.

• A full-grown shire can weigh over a tonne and stand taller than a man.

Where does shire come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word descends directly from the Old English scir, which originally meant an official charge, an office, or the area of administration under a royal governor. It was a native Germanic word, related to forms in Old High German that carried the sense of business or care, and it long predates the Norman influence on English. As Anglo-Saxon England was divided into administrative units each overseen by an officer called a scir-gerefa (literally the reeve of the shire), the word shifted from meaning the office to meaning the territory itself, the ancestor of the modern county. That very title scir-gerefa, the shire-reeve, was worn down over the centuries into the familiar word sheriff. The trap in spelling is purely the vowel: the word looks as though it might rhyme with ire, and the silent shaping of the long vowel before the final -re catches writers who expect a plainer ending.

How the word is built

• shire (from Old English scir: an administrative district or office)