Shoe

How to spell shoe

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce shoe

What does shoe mean?

1. nounA covering for the foot, typically with a sturdy sole and not reaching above the ankle.
2. verbTo fit a horse with a protective metal plate on its hoof.

Shoe in a sentence

• noun

  A small stone had worked its way into her left shoe.

• verb

  The farrier came every six weeks to shoe the heavier ponies.

• noun

  He polished every shoe in the cupboard before the interview.

• verb

  It takes real skill to shoe a nervous young horse safely.

Where does shoe come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Shoe descends directly from the Old English scōh, the everyday word for a covering worn on the foot, and it belongs to a wider Germanic family that includes the Dutch schoen and the German Schuh. The original Germanic root carried the broad sense of something that covers or protects, which is why related forms in cousin languages could refer to coverings generally before settling on footwear. Across the medieval period the spelling drifted through forms such as scho and sho, and the modern look with its silent, surprising 'oe' ending was fixed only later by printers and convention rather than by pronunciation. That is the real spelling trap: the word sounds like a simple long 'oo', yet it is written with 'oe', and its old plural 'shoon' survived in poetry for centuries before 'shoes' won out. Because the ending gives no phonetic clue, writers must simply remember that this short, ancient word ends in a silent e after the o.

How the word is built

• shoe (from Old English scōh: a covering for the foot); a single root word with no prefix or suffix