Shoulder

How to spell shoulder

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce shoulder

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does shoulder mean?

1. nounThe joint and surrounding area where the arm connects to the upper body.
2. nounThe strip of land or paved verge running along the edge of a road.
3. verbTo take on or accept a burden, responsibility, or blame.

Shoulder in a sentence

• noun

  She carried the heavy bag on her left shoulder all afternoon.

• noun

  The broken-down car was parked safely on the hard shoulder of the motorway.

• verb

  She had to shoulder most of the blame for the failed project.

• noun

  The physiotherapist examined his stiff shoulder after the fall.

• noun

  Police closed the shoulder of the highway while the wreckage was cleared.

• verb

  Younger workers often shoulder the cost of decisions made years before.

Where does shoulder come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a native English word, descending from the Old English sculdor, which named exactly what it names today: the joint and surrounding area where the arm meets the trunk of the body. It belongs to a tight family of West Germanic words, with close relatives in the Dutch schouder and the German Schulter, all going back to a shared ancestor whose deeper meaning is not fully recovered. The spelling has drifted considerably from the Old English form; the modern 'ou' represents the long vowel that English writers settled on, and the silent-feeling 'l' is genuinely pronounced, which is part of what trips writers up. The figurative verb, meaning to take a burden onto oneself, grew naturally from the literal image of carrying a load across the shoulders. Because the word is so old and everyday, its spelling has become fossilised in a slightly irregular shape that no longer maps neatly onto its sound.

How the word is built

• shoulder (single Old English root sculdor: the joint between arm and trunk); no productive prefix or suffix