shear
Verbshears, shearing, sheared, shorn
Noun pluralshears
Formsshears, shearing, sheared, shorn
Pluralshears
- 1To remove the fleece from a sheep, llama, or similar animal by clipping it close.
The ranch hands shear hundreds of sheep before the wool market opens.
Skilled workers shear faster when the animals stay calm.
Similarfleece
Note
Farm work carries the word's long history. Old English sċieran meant both "to shear" and "to shave," from a root meaning "to cut." The verb works with or without an object: you shear the llamas, or the hands shear all week. Its past forms are unusually crowded. The past tense is sheared or the older shore, and the participle is sheared or shorn.
- 2A scissor-like cutting tool, usually larger and heavier than scissors, used for tougher materials.
The factory's hydraulic shear cut the steel bars to length.
A good shear can slice through sheet metal with a single stroke.
Similarshears
Note
The tool is more often spoken of in the plural, shears, the way scissors is. The singular is older and still turns up. John Dryden's translation of Virgil's Georgics (1697) has sheep "short of their wool, and naked from the shear." In workshops the singular is natural for a single powered cutter, while hand tools usually come as a pair of shears.
- 3
- 4To cut through something, now usually with shears or something similar, though in early use with a sword or other blade.
The blade sheared through bone and sinew alike.
Workers shear the steel cables with a single powerful stroke.
Similarcut, slice, sever, cleave
Note
Here the old strong forms come into their own. In Walter Scott's Ivanhoe (1819), a Templar's blade "shore asunder" the handle of a mace. Shakespeare's Sonnet 68 mourns golden tresses "shorn away." Both belong to the sword-and-blade side of the sense. The same verb covers cutting with shears, real or imagined, so a blade, a cutter or a stroke of bad luck can shear through something.
- 5To break or suddenly separate because of excessive force, as a bolt does under strain.
Under the strain of the gust, several rivets sheared off at once.
Cheap fasteners shear long before reaching their rated load.
Similarsnap, break, fail, fracture
Note
The engineer's word for sudden failure most often comes with off: a bolt, pin or rivet shears off. The break is clean and runs along a plane where opposed forces meet, which is why fasteners are the classic example. Use shear off when a part separates completely. Plain shear also works when the snapping is the whole story.
- 6Forces that push in opposite directions across a material.
The beam buckled under the shear created by the shifting load.
Geologists measured the shear along the fault line.
Note
The physicist's noun stands beside tension and compression as a third kind of loading. Those two push or pull straight into a surface. Shear acts along it, tending to slide one layer past the next. The word is both countable and uncountable. A beam can fail in shear, or engineers can compare the shears acting at different points.
- 7Of a material or body, to be distorted by forces that push its parts in opposite directions.
The metal block sheared visibly as the press applied uneven pressure.
Soft sediments shear more readily than solid bedrock.
Similardeform
Note
In physics, deforming by shear means changing shape as layers slide past one another under opposed forces. A material is not stretched or squashed this way, and it need not break. A block can shear visibly and stay whole. When the material gives way altogether, the word moves to the snapping-off sense.
- 8A rapid change in wind speed or direction over a relatively short distance, especially as a hazard to aircraft.
Forecasters tracked the shear building ahead of the cold front.
The crew encountered severe shear just after takeoff.
Note
Aviation treats wind shear as something to measure, not just notice. A 1985 National Transportation Safety Board report gives "an average shear rate of about 2.5 knots per second" during a takeoff. In this uncountable use the word names the phenomenon in general. A single encounter is a countable shear.
- 9The act of shearing, or the fleece removed in the process.
The spring shear yielded several bales of fine wool.
After the shear, the flock looked noticeably smaller.
Similarclip
Note
Sheep farmers once counted a ram's age in shearings. William Youatt's Sheep: Their Breeds, Management, and Diseases (1837) explains that after the second shearing he is "a two-shear ram," then a three-shear ram, "the name always taking its date from the time of shearing." Here the noun works as an annual milestone as well as an event.
- 10An individual occurrence of wind shear, the abrupt change in wind speed or direction across a relatively short distance.
The pilot reported a violent shear just before touching down.
Low-level shears around the airfield delayed several departures.
Note
Cockpit talk gives the countable noun its collocations. Crews hit a shear, often on approach, and a bad one can force them to go around. Adjectives grade it: a nasty shear, a severe shear, a low-level shear.
- 11A large powered machine used to cut sheet metal, driving a heavy blade across the surface to part it cleanly.
The shop's hydraulic shear could cut through half-inch steel plate.
An operator guided each panel under the shear's descending blade.
Note
In metalworking the machine is named for its cutting action. A moving blade is forced past a fixed one, parting the sheet along a straight edge. Unlike a saw, it removes no material and leaves no kerf of waste.
- 12To strip someone of their money or possessions, especially through trickery or exploitation.
The crooked broker sheared his clients of their life savings.
Unscrupulous lenders shear vulnerable borrowers with hidden fees and penalties.
Similarfleece, swindle, cheat, rob
Note
The metaphor comes from the farmyard. The victim is the sheep, and what is clipped away is money instead of wool. Fleece made exactly the same jump, which is why the two verbs gloss each other here and in the sheep-clipping sense. Both suggest a stripping that is thorough and leaves the victim exposed.
- 13Of wind or a current, to change abruptly in direction or speed across a short distance.
The airflow sheared violently just above the runway.
Crosswinds often shear near mountain ridges, surprising pilots.
Note
Pilots and forecasters use this verb without an object, and its subject is the wind. It typically takes a from…to frame. A 1985 National Transportation Safety Board report describes a runway wind that "sheared from an 8-knot headwind to about a 56-knot tailwind over a 44-second period." That frame lets the speakers state both ends of the change and how fast it came.
- 14The way a rock body deforms under stress (usually compression) producing distinctive textures in the resulting rock.
The schist's foliation records intense shear deep within the mountain belt.
Mapping the shear across the fault zone revealed the direction of ancient stress.
Note
To a structural geologist, shear is written into the rock itself. Under stress, usually compressive, grains and fabrics realign into telltale textures such as foliation, schistosity and mylonitic banding. Reading those textures lets a geologist map a shear zone and infer which way ancient forces pushed.
- 15To transform a figure by sliding every point parallel to a fixed line, by an amount proportional to that point's distance from the line.
To shear a rectangle, the program shifts each row sideways in proportion to its height.
The animator sheared the sprite to suggest rapid motion.
Similarskew
Note
To a geometer, the verb names a precise operation. The figure slants but does not shrink or grow, because area is preserved while angles are not. A sheared square becomes a parallelogram of the same area. The verb is transitive, and you shear a shape along an axis. The result has its own noun, the transformation itself.
- 16A geometric transformation that slides every point parallel to a fixed line by a distance proportional to that point's distance from the line.
Applying a shear to the grid skews all the squares uniformly.
In the matrix, a horizontal shear leaves the vertical positions unchanged.
Similarskew
Note
A shear is usually named by its axis. A horizontal shear slides points sideways and leaves every height unchanged, and a vertical shear does the reverse. In linear algebra it is a linear transformation with a simple matrix. The noun is countable, so a sequence of shears can be combined. The verb carries the point about area and angle.
- 17To make a vertical cut into a coal seam, typically to free a section of coal for removal.
Before the explosives went in, the crew sheared along the seam's lower edge.
Older machines shear far more slowly than modern continuous miners.
Note
This is a miner's verb, used without an object. A crew shears along a seam rather than shearing the coal itself. The cut runs vertically into the working face so that blasting or machinery can then bring the coal down more easily.
- 18To cut down and harvest grain such as wheat or barley.
The reapers sheared the ripe oats from dawn until dusk.
In late summer, the whole village would shear the standing grain.
Similarreap, harvest, cut, mow
Note
This is a Scottish harvest word that takes the verb out to the fields. Grain is cut close, as a fleece is. In John Aldington's A Poem on the Cruelty of Shooting (1769), scythe and sickle "shear'd the golden Grain" before the sportsman stalks out. Outside Scottish use, reap or harvest is the safer choice, since most readers will picture sheep.
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Practice
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Origin
From Middle English sheren, from Old English sċieran ("to shear; to shave"), tracing back through Proto-Germanic *skeraną to the Proto-Indo-European root *(s)ker- ("to cut"). It is related to Dutch and German scheren, Swedish skära, and Latin caro ("flesh").