shaft
/ˈʃɐːft/
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 3.90 in modern English
11
Scrabble Score
5
Letters
1
Syllables
5
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
The main axis of a feather.
Example Sentences
- "A shaft hath three principal parts, the stele, the feathers, and the head."
- "Her hand slipped off the javelin's shaft towards the spearpoint and that's why her score was lowered."
- "Orion hit a rabbit once; but though sore wounded it got to the bury, and, struggling in, the arrow caught the side of the hole and was drawn out.[…]. Ikey the blacksmith had forged us a spearhead after a sketch from a picture of a Greek warrior; and a rake-handle served as a shaft."
- "[…]and the Thunder, / Wing'd with red Lightning and impetuous rage, / Perhaps hath ſpent his ſhafts […]"
- "The correction of theſe will reſtore its proper dignity to the ſtudy of antiquities, and cauſe the ſhafts of ridicule, which have been ſucceſsfully thrown at it, to recoil."
- "Moya and her new friend Mamie have been shrieking appropriate quotations at one another, upstairs and down, for days past. Of course, I didn't see the exact point of the various shafts of wit until now, but this is evidently what was brewing."
Etymology
From Middle English chafte, saft, scaft, schaft, schafte, scheft, shaffet, shaft, from Old English sċeaft, from Proto-West Germanic *skaft, from Proto-Germanic *skaftaz (“shaft”), from Proto-Indo-European *skeh₂p- (“club, rod, shaft, staff”). Cognates Cognate with Dutch schacht (“shaft”), German Schaft (“shaft”), Low German Schacht, Skacht (“shaft; cane, stick; beating”), Danish, Icelandic, Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk, and Swedish skaft (“handle; stem; shaft”); also Latin scapus (“stalk, stem; shaft”), Greek σκήπτρο (skíptro, “sceptre”), Albanian shkop (“staff, stick”), Belarusian кап'ё (kapʺjó, “spear”), Bulgarian ко́пие (kópie, “spear”), Czech kopí (“spear”), Macedonian копје (kopje, “spear”), Polish kopia (“spear”), Russian копьё (kopʹjó, “spear”), Serbo-Croatian ко̏пље, kȍplje (“spear”), Slovak kopija (“spear”), Slovene kopje (“javelin”). In Early Modern English, shaft referred to the entire body of a long weapon, such that an arrow's “shaft” was composed of its tip, stale, and fletching. Over time, the word came to be used in place of the former stale and lost its original meaning.
Origin
Word Breakdown
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /ˈʃɐːft/
- British English: /ˈʃɑːft/
Usage
Inflected Forms
Derived Forms
aftershaft
airshaft
backshaft
bareshaft
brakeshaft
camshaft
clutchshaft
cockshaft
countershaft
crankshaft
driveshaft
dropshaft