Shock

How to spell shock

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce shock

What does shock mean?

1. nounA sudden and upsetting feeling caused by an unexpected or distressing event.
2. verbTo cause someone to feel surprised and distressed.
3. nounA sudden, violent effect of an electric current passing through the body.
4. nounA dangerous medical condition in which blood flow to the body's tissues drops sharply.

Shock in a sentence

• noun

  The news of the layoffs came as a complete shock to the staff.

• verb

  The rising cost of the repairs will shock most homeowners.

• noun

  He got a nasty shock from the frayed kettle cord.

• noun

  Paramedics treated the crash victim for shock at the scene.

• noun

  She sat in stunned shock after reading the letter.

• verb

  The documentary set out to shock viewers into action.

Where does shock come from?

Language of origin: French

Shock entered English in the middle of the sixteenth century from French, where the noun choc and the verb choquer described a violent collision, especially the clash of two charging bodies of soldiers. The earliest English uses were military in exactly this sense: the meeting of two forces with a jarring impact. From that physical collision the meaning broadened to any sudden and forceful blow, and then to the emotional jolt of a surprising or distressing event. By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the word had picked up its technical lives as well, naming the violent jolt of an electric current through the body and the dangerous collapse of the circulation that doctors call shock. The ultimate source of the French word is uncertain and probably imitative of the sound of an impact, which is why dictionaries are cautious about tracing it any further back. A quite separate older English sense, a 'shock' meaning a thick bushy mass (as in a shock of hair or a stacked group of corn sheaves), is a different word entirely that happens to share the spelling.

How the word is built

• shock (single root; from French choc/choquer, a collision or violent encounter)