shafted

1. 1
   adjectiveslangIrelandUK

   Cheated or treated unfairly; ripped off.

   Forty quid for a phone case? You were proper shafted, mate.

   Season-ticket holders feel shafted after the club doubled prices over the summer.

   Similarcheated, fleeced, screwed

   Note

   This is slang for the sting of being cheated, and it usually follows feel or get: season-ticket holders feel shafted, you got shafted. It keeps the victim in view, where the verb form names the culprit: he shafted his partner. Being an adjective, it can be graded, so one customer can be more shafted than another. Keep it for casual talk, alongside screwed and ripped off.

2. 2
   verb

   Past tense and past participle of shaft.

   He claims his business partner shafted him out of his share of the profits.

   Each arrow was shafted with straight-grained cedar before the feathers went on.

   Note

   Shaft adds -ed for both the past (his partner shafted him) and the participle after have or be (he had been shafted). Two of the verb's meanings are slang, one for cheating someone and one sexual, so the form is safest in casual talk; only the workshop sense, fitting an arrow or a tool with a shaft, belongs comfortably in formal writing.

3. 3
   adjective

   Fitted with a shaft.

   The cathedral's nave is lined with shafted piers of pale limestone.

   She traded her graphite-shafted irons for an older steel-shafted set.

4. 4
   adjective

   Of a spear, ax, dagger or similar charge, having its shaft or handle in a stated tincture, typically one different from the head.

   The new arms were blazoned azure, a lance argent shafted or.

   In the crest, an armored arm grips a battle-ax proper, shafted sable.

   Note

   A blazon word that comes after the weapon it describes, the way tinctures do, and takes a tincture of its own: a battle-ax proper, shafted gules, has a red handle. Blazons often pair it with proper, as in a dirk proper shafted gules, the blade in its natural colors and the handle red. One word does the work of a whole clause about the handle.

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