shelf

Pluralshelves, shelfs

1. 1
   nouncountable

   A flat, rigid structure fixed at right angles to a wall or built into a cabinet or desk, used to store, display, or support objects.

   He reached for the dictionary on the top shelf.

   The store's shelves were stocked with fresh produce.

   Note

   The core sense carries the history behind most of the others. Old English sċylfe meant a shelf, a ledge or a ship's deck. The word goes back to a root meaning "to cut," which distantly links it to shell, sculpt and carve. In the plural the f turns to v, giving shelves, and that same v reappears in the verb shelve.

2. 2
   nouncountable

   A projecting ledge of rock, ice, or land that resembles a shelf in form.

   The trail wound up to a grassy shelf overlooking the valley.

   Ice broke away from the floating shelf at the glacier's edge.

   Similarledge, terrace

   Note

   A ledge of rock, ice or land is more than a borrowed image. The Old English ancestor already meant "ledge," and the Germanic word behind it covered shelf, ledge and cliff alike. So the landscape sense is as old as the household one, and it belongs to the same history told under the household shelf.

3. 3
   noununcountable

   The amount of storage or display space that a shelf provides.

   The pantry offers plenty of shelf for canned goods and dry staples.

   Adding a second cabinet doubled the available shelf in the kitchen.

   Similarstorage, space

   Note

   Here the word works as a measure, the way cup or box does. A shelf of videos means as many videos as one shelf holds, not the board they sit on. The meaning slides from the object in the furniture sense to what it contains, so the noun after of names the contents.

4. 4
   nouncountable

   A reef, sandbar, or shoal lying in a body of water.

   The fishing boat scraped its hull on a sandy shelf near the harbor mouth.

   Charts warned of a rocky shelf that had wrecked several vessels.

   Similarreef, shoal, sandbar, bank

   Note

   A separate word that happens to share the spelling. Its origin is obscure. It seems to be the same word as Middle English shelp, meaning a sandbar in a river, although the change in sound is unexpected. Iosuah Silvester's merchant in 1594 escapes "dangerous shelfs and sands," and Florio's A Worlde of Words (1598) lists shelfs alongside rocks and flats. Note the plural: shelfs, not shelves.

5. 5
   verb

   Alternative form of shelve. Uncommon; shelve is the standard spelling of the verb.

   Management decided to shelf the proposal after the budget cuts.

   She asked the clerks to shelf the new arrivals before closing.

   Note

   A verb built directly on the noun, keeping the f in every form: shelfs, shelfing, shelfed. The usual verb shelve has a v instead. Both forms cover the same range of meanings, from putting books on a shelf to postponing a project or removing someone from active service. So "shelf the proposal" and "shelve the proposal" mean the same thing.

6. 6
   nouncountable

   The part of a version-control repository where shelvesets (sets of pending changes) are stored.

   She pushed her pending edits to the shelf so a teammate could pick them up.

   Recovering the lost code meant pulling an old set from the shelf.

   Note

   Version control borrowed the household picture for Microsoft's tools. In Visual Studio the action is shelving, and the saved bundle of pending changes is a shelveset. Bradley Irby's Reengineering .NET (2012) describes the shelf as a place on the server, kept apart from the main line of code, so nothing parked there affects other developers. Each team member has a shelf of their own and can store as many shelvesets there as they like.

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