Shred

How to spell shred

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce shred

What does shred mean?

1. verbTo cut or tear something into thin strips or small pieces.
2. nounA small strip or fragment torn or cut from something, or the smallest possible amount of it.

Shred in a sentence

• verb

  The office policy is to shred every document containing personal data.

• noun

  There was not a single shred of evidence to support the claim.

• verb

  She likes to shred the carrots before adding them to the salad.

• noun

  A thin shred of paper was caught in the printer rollers.

Where does shred come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word descends from the Old English screade, which meant a fragment or strip cut from something larger, and it belongs to the same Germanic family as the Dutch schroot and the German Schrot, both referring to small cut pieces. The underlying sense was always about a thing trimmed away, a paring or offcut left over from cutting cloth, food, or wood. The verb sense, meaning to cut or tear into thin strips, grew naturally out of the noun and was well established by the medieval period. Because the word is a short, native Anglo-Saxon term, its spelling is refreshingly phonetic: the cluster sh-r-e-d simply mirrors the sounds, with no silent letters or borrowed quirks to trip a writer up. A pleasant modern echo is the office shredder, a direct descendant of that original idea of slicing something into useless little strips.

How the word is built

• shred (single Old English root screade meaning a piece cut off); no prefix or suffix