Shuffle

How to spell shuffle

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce shuffle

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does shuffle mean?

1. verbTo move by dragging the feet, or to mix or rearrange items into a different order.
2. nounAn act of mixing or rearranging, or a dragging movement of the feet.

Shuffle in a sentence

• verb

  The tired commuters began to shuffle slowly toward the exit.

• noun

  The cabinet shuffle brought three new ministers into senior roles.

• verb

  Please shuffle the deck thoroughly before dealing the cards.

• noun

  She set the playlist to shuffle so the songs played in random order.

Where does shuffle come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Shuffle entered English in the early 1500s and is generally traced to Low German schuffeln, which meant 'to walk clumsily, to drag the feet, or to mix together'. That word belongs to the same family as the native English verb 'shove', both going back to a Germanic root meaning 'to push or move along'. The -le ending is a frequentative suffix, the same one that turns 'wag' into the idea of repeated little movements, so a shuffle is literally a series of small pushing or dragging motions. From the physical sense of dragging the feet, the meaning spread naturally to mixing playing cards (pushing them repeatedly past one another) and then to rearranging anything into a new order. The doubled f and the soft -le ending are the spelling traps, both inherited from that Low German pattern rather than from anything Latin.

How the word is built

• shuff- (frequentative base related to 'shove': to push or move along)
• -le (frequentative/repeated-action suffix)