Shrub

How to spell shrub

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce shrub

What does shrub mean?

1. nounA woody plant that is smaller than a tree and has several stems rising from near the ground.

Shrub in a sentence

• She planted a flowering shrub beside the front gate.

• The gardener trimmed each shrub into a neat rounded shape.

Where does shrub come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The plant sense of shrub comes from the Old English scrubb or scrybb, which meant brushwood or a thicket of low woody growth. It belongs to the native Germanic word stock of English rather than being borrowed from Latin or French, and it is related to dialect words for rough scrubland; indeed 'scrub' (low, scraggy vegetation) is essentially the same word from the same source. Over the centuries the spelling settled with the 'shr' opening that English keeps for several plant and growth words, and the meaning narrowed to a bushy plant with several woody stems rising from near the ground. There is a quite separate homonym, the old cordial called a shrub made from fruit, sugar, and vinegar, which traces instead to the Arabic sharab meaning 'a drink' (the same root that gave us 'syrup' and 'sherbet'); the two words simply collided in form. For spelling, the trap is small: the silent-feeling cluster 'shr' is easy to slip into 'shr' versus 'sh', but the word is otherwise phonetic.

How the word is built

• shrub (a single native root; a woody plant smaller than a tree, no prefix or suffix)