Shudder

How to spell shudder

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce shudder

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does shudder mean?

1. verbTo shake suddenly and briefly, usually from cold, fear, or revulsion.
2. nounA sudden, brief trembling movement of the body.

Shudder in a sentence

• verb

  The cold draught made her shudder at her desk.

• noun

  A shudder ran through him as the lift dropped sharply.

• verb

  He would shudder every time he recalled the accident.

• noun

  She felt a shudder of dread when the phone rang at midnight.

Where does shudder come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word comes from Middle English schoderen or shoderen, meaning 'to tremble' or 'to shiver', and it appears in writing from around the 1300s. It shares ancestry with the Middle Dutch schoderen and the Middle Low German schoderen, both describing a quick shaking of the body, so the word sits firmly in the West Germanic family rather than the Latin or French borrowings that fill so much of English. The root carries the idea of a sudden, involuntary shake, whether from cold, fear, or disgust, and that core sense has barely changed in seven centuries. The spelling trap lives in the middle: the short, sharp vowel forces the consonant to double, giving 'shudder' two d's, much like 'rudder' and 'udder'. Writers who hear a single beat sometimes drop one d, but the doubled letter is what keeps the vowel short.

How the word is built

• shudder (from Middle English schoderen: to tremble)
• the doubled -dd- holding the short stressed vowel