Shore

How to spell shore

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce shore

What does shore mean?

1. nounThe strip of land that runs along the edge of a sea, lake, or large river.
2. verbTo support or strengthen something, often with a prop or beam, so it does not collapse or weaken.

Shore in a sentence

• noun

  The tired swimmers finally reached the shore before dark.

• verb

  Engineers worked overnight to shore up the cracked retaining wall.

• noun

  A row of cottages stood along the rocky shore of the lake.

• verb

  The government announced new loans to shore up the struggling banks.

Where does shore come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Shore arrived in Middle English around the 1300s as schore, and its earlier history is genuinely murky, which is why its origin is best described as broadly Germanic rather than tied to one clean ancestor. The 'edge of the sea' meaning is related to words in Middle Low German and Middle Dutch (schore) for a coastline, and some scholars link it to a root meaning 'to cut', the idea being the line where land is cut off by water. The quite separate sense of a wooden prop, the source of the modern phrase 'to shore up', also came from Middle Dutch or Middle Low German schore meaning a beam used to support something leaning. Over time English merged these spellings into the single form shore. The main spelling trap is purely aural: shore sounds identical to 'sure' in many accents, so writers must anchor it to the visible 'sh' and the seaside or supporting sense rather than to certainty.

How the word is built

• shore (single root; from Middle English schore, a coastline or a supporting prop)