shaft
Pluralshafts
Pluralshafts
Formsshafts, shafting, shafted
- 1A vertical passage in a building through which an elevator travels.
Firefighters lowered a rope down the shaft to reach the trapped elevator car.
The renovation added two glass-walled elevator shafts to the atrium.
Similarliftshaft
- 2A vertical or sloping passage dug down into the earth as part of a mine.
Ore from the lower levels was hoisted up the main shaft in iron buckets.
Fences now surround the abandoned shafts left by the old tin miners.
Similarmineshaft
- 3Any object that is long and thin, such as the handle of a tool.
He replaced the splintered hickory shaft on his ax with a fiberglass one.
Golfers with slower swings often prefer clubs with flexible graphite shafts.
Note
Here the word is at its widest, naming the shape its narrower senses share: the body of an arrow in the weapon sense, the part of a column between capital and pedestal in the architectural sense. In use, shaft names the long part as distinct from what is fitted to its end (shaft and head on an ax, shaft and clubhead on a golf club), so a new shaft can keep the old head.
- 4A long rotating rod in a machine that transmits power from one part to another; a driveshaft.
Steam drives the turbine's blades, which turn a shaft connected to the generator.
A cracked propeller shaft left the ship drifting for two days.
Similardriveshaft
- 5The long, slender stem forming the main body of an arrow, spear, or javelin.
She gripped the spear just below the point, where the shaft was wrapped in leather.
Modern target arrows have shafts of carbon fiber rather than cedar.
Similarhaft
- 6To treat someone unfairly or cause them harm, especially by deceiving or betraying them.
Lenders who hide fees in the fine print are out to shaft their customers.
Investors felt shafted when the founders quietly sold their own shares first.
Note
The cheating sense is blunt slang but milder than fuck over, so it suits everyday complaints about an employer, a lender or a business partner. It is very often passive, get shafted or feel shafted, because the speaker is usually the one who lost out. The sexual verb is spelled the same, so the sentence has to make clear which is meant.
- 7A narrow, clearly defined beam or ray of light.
A single shaft of moonlight lit the dust drifting through the empty hall.
Through the broken roof, shafts of pale light picked out the rusting machinery.
Note
Light becomes a shaft when it shows its edges, a beam cutting through dust or shade, and the word gives a scene a painterly touch. Willa Cather's The Bohemian Girl (1912) has the sun sending "long, quivering shafts of gold" up among the rafters. It usually takes of: a shaft of sunlight, of moonlight, of gold.
- 8A duct or passage that carries air for ventilation or heating.
Stale air from the kitchen is drawn up a shaft and vented through the roof.
Fresh air reaches the tunnel through three shafts that open onto a park overhead.
Similarairduct
- 9Any column or pillar, especially the part of a column between the capital at the top and the pedestal below.
The town raised a granite shaft in the square to honor its war dead.
Fluting runs the full length of each shaft, from the base to the capital.
Note
Classical columns are read from the ground up as base, shaft and capital, and the shaft is the long middle stretch that carries the load, plain or fluted and often slightly tapered toward the top. A shaft can also stand alone as a monument with no roof to hold up: Emerson's hymn asks Time and Nature to spare the shaft raised in honor of heroes who dared to die.
- 10The long, cylindrical main body of the penis.
The lesion appeared on the shaft rather than the glans, which narrowed the diagnosis.
The surgeon closed the incision along the penile shaft with dissolving stitches.
Note
Anatomists divide the penis into root, shaft and glans; the shaft is the free cylindrical part between the other two, and it holds the columns of erectile tissue and the urethra. Clinical writing often says penile shaft, and treats the skin covering it as a structure in its own right, homologous to the labia minora.
- 11One of the pair of poles between which a horse or other draft animal is harnessed to a vehicle.
The groom backed the mare between the shafts and buckled the harness.
A cracked shaft meant the wagon had to be left by the roadside.
Similarpole
Note
Shafts come in pairs with the animal standing between them, so the phrase that keeps turning up is between the shafts, as when a bay mare tosses her head between the shafts of a dog cart in Barbara Sleigh's Jessamy. Because the poles work as a pair, the word is usually plural in this sense.
- 12The main central stem that runs along the length of a feather.
Under the microscope, rows of fine barbs branch off both sides of the feather's shaft.
The shafts of the long tail feathers were striped black and white.
Similarrachis
- 13Anything hurled or thrown like a spear or javelin.
The senator brushed off the shafts of ridicule aimed at his plan.
In the myth, Zeus hurls one fiery shaft after another at the rebel giants.
Note
The thing thrown is most often words: shafts of ridicule or sarcasm, aimed at someone and meant to sting, with of naming what is hurled. Vicesimus Knox, in his Essays Moral and Literary, wanted the shafts of ridicule thrown at the study of antiquities to recoil on the throwers. Milton keeps the word nearer the weapon in Paradise Lost, where the Thunder, winged with red lightning, may have spent his shafts.
- 14To have sexual intercourse with someone.
Note
Writers reach for it when a character should sound deliberately coarse, as Irvine Welsh does in Trainspotting (1993), and the -ing form serves as a noun too, as in not even a decent shafting. Its register is the one described under the noun for a single act: fine in that kind of dialogue, out of place almost everywhere else.
- 15An act of sexual intercourse.
There was no time for a shaft before the taxi arrived.
He bragged to his friends about a shaft with his ex, as if anyone had asked.
Note
Like the verb for having sex, this is coarse slang, as blunt as the four-letter word it stands in for, and it will offend almost anywhere outside the crudest talk. The noun counts a single act and goes with have, as in a quick shaft in Najat El Hachmi's The Last Patriarch.
- 16A relatively small area of precipitation that an onlooker can make out against the dry area around it.
Storm chasers photographed a heavy shaft of hail falling from the edge of the thunderstorm.
Across the plains, isolated shafts of rain hung beneath the clouds while the ground around them stayed dry.
Note
Seen from a distance, a shaft looks like a gray column or curtain hanging from the cloud base, with dry ground on either side, and storm watchers speak of rain shafts and hail shafts. When the falling precipitation evaporates before it lands, the trailing streaks are called virga instead, because nothing reaches the ground.
- 17To fit something with a shaft.
The club fitter offered to shaft the irons with lighter graphite.
The smiths shafted each spearhead with seasoned ash before the hunt.
- 18The entire body of a long weapon such as an arrow, not just its stem.
She drew a shaft from the quiver, set it to the string, and let it fly.
A shaft hath three principal parts, the stele, the feathers, and the head.
1545, Roger Ascham, ToxophilusNote
Older archery treated the shaft as the whole arrow, not just its stem. Roger Ascham's Toxophilus (1545) divides a shaft into three parts, the stele, the feathers and the head, so the stem had a name of its own. Read a shaft in old writing as a complete arrow; the stem alone is what the word means today.
- 19The long, narrow pole that forms the main part of a lacrosse stick.
- 20The chamber inside a blast furnace.
- 21A part of a loom that holds the heddles and is raised by the treadles to form the shed.
Showing meanings only.
Practice
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Origin
From Middle English schaft, from Old English sċeaft, from Proto-Germanic *skaftaz; related to Dutch schacht, German Schaft and Swedish skaft. In Early Modern English it meant the whole body of a long weapon, so an arrow's shaft included its tip, stale and fletching; over time it took the place of stale and lost that original meaning.