Shop
nounA building or part of a building where goods or services are sold.
How to spell shop
4 letters · 1 syllable
How to pronounce shop
What does shop mean?
- nounA building or part of a building where goods or services are sold.
- verbTo visit one or more stores in order to look at or buy goods.
Shop in a sentence
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noun
The corner shop sells milk and newspapers.
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verb
They prefer to shop online rather than drive to the mall.
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noun
They opened a shop selling handmade furniture.
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verb
She likes to shop for groceries early on a Saturday.
Where does shop come from?
Language of origin: Germanic
Shop traces back to the late Old English word sceoppa, which meant a small booth, stall, or shed where goods were sold or work was carried out. It belongs to a wider Germanic family that includes the Old High German scopf, meaning a building without walls or a porch, so the earliest sense was very much about a humble structure rather than a grand premises. Over the medieval period the spelling settled and the meaning narrowed to a place of retail trade, while the older idea of a place of work survives in compounds like workshop and machine shop. The verb sense, meaning to visit shops in order to buy, grew out of the noun and became common only later, by the eighteenth century. Because the word is short and phonetic, its spelling has stayed remarkably stable, with no silent letters to trip up a modern writer.
How the word is built
- shop (single root, from Old English sceoppa: a booth or shed)
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