shanking

Pluralshankings

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of shank.

   She was shanking her irons all afternoon and finished well over par.

   The inmate was charged with shanking a guard in the dining hall.

   Note

   A golfer's mishit and a slang word for stabbing share this form, and the object usually settles which is meant: shanking an iron is striking the ball off the part of the club head that joins the shaft, while shanking a guard is a stabbing. In slang it can also mean pulling someone's pants down as a joke.

2. 2
   nounslangcountable

   A stabbing carried out with a shank, a homemade blade.

   After the shanking in the laundry room, the whole cellblock was locked down for a week.

   Old-timers on the block talked about the fights and shankings they had seen over the years.

   Similarstabbing

   Note

   The word belongs to prison talk, where a shank is a homemade blade, and it counts like any ordinary noun: one shanking, or a year of shankings. In Life, Death and Sex in Prison it pairs naturally with cuttings: "some shankings and cuttings that happen during a year." Beyond that world it is rough slang, best kept to casual or quoted speech.

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