Shroud

How to spell shroud

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce shroud

What does shroud mean?

1. nounA length of cloth in which a dead body is wrapped for burial.
2. verbTo cover, screen, or conceal something from view.

Shroud in a sentence

• noun

  The textile exhibit included a plain linen shroud from a medieval collection.

• verb

  Thick fog began to shroud the valley before dawn.

• noun

  Archaeologists found traces of a woven shroud inside the ancient tomb.

• verb

  The company tried to shroud the merger in secrecy until the deal closed.

Where does shroud come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The word descends directly from the Old English noun scrud, which simply meant a garment, a piece of clothing, or a covering of cloth. That word came from the same Germanic root as the verb 'shred', tying both back to a shared idea of cut cloth and pieces of material. For centuries it meant any covering or shelter before it narrowed, around the 1500s, to the specific sense of the cloth used to wrap a body for burial. From that gloomy noun grew the figurative verb meaning to conceal or screen something from view, as in fog shrouding the hills. Sailors also borrowed the word for the set of ropes that brace a ship's mast, a use that survives in 'the shrouds'. The spelling keeps the older 'ou' digraph rather than the simpler 'ow', which is the small trap that catches writers expecting it to look like 'crowd' or 'proud'.

How the word is built

• shroud (a single Old English root scrud meaning garment or clothing); no prefix or suffix, just the bare root