shell
/ʃɛl/
Word Rarity
Uncommon
Frequency: Zipf frequency 4.39 in modern English
8
Scrabble Score
5
Letters
1
Syllables
4
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
The hard calcareous covering of a bird egg.
Example Sentences
- "In some mollusks, as the cuttlefish, the shell is concealed by the animal's outer mantle and is considered internal."
- "Genuine mother-of-pearl buttons are made from sea shells."
- "[…] if with thee the roaring wells Should gulf him fathom-deep in brine; And hands so often clasp’d in mine, Should toss with tangle and with shells."
- "The restaurant served caramelized onion shells."
- "The black walnut and the hickory nut, both of the same Genus as the pecan, have much thicker and harder shells than the pecan."
- "Upstairs in that chill darkened room which nobody passes who can help it , the old Baronet lies in his coffin shell - an awful form faintly defined beneath the sheet"
Etymology
Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *(s)kelH- Proto-Indo-European *skol-yeh₂ Proto-Germanic *skaljō Proto-West Germanic *skallju Old English sċiell Middle English schelle English shell From Middle English schelle, from Old English sċel, sċell, sċiell, sċil, sċill, sċyl, sċyll, from Proto-West Germanic *skallju, from Proto-Germanic *skaljō (“shell; husk; rind; peel”), from Proto-Indo-European *(s)kelH- (“to cut; to separate, split”). Cognates Cognate with Dutch schil (“bark, rind, skin; crust; shell; slice”), Danish skæl (“scale; dandruff”), Faroese and Icelandic skel (“shell”), Norwegian Bokmål skjell (“shell; scale”), Norwegian Nynorsk skjel (“shell; bivalve; scale; carapace”), Gothic 𐍃𐌺𐌰𐌻𐌾𐌰 (skalja, “brick, tile”), French écaille (“scale; shell”), Friulian scae (“scale”), Italian scaglia (“scale; flake, sliver; splinter”); also Breton killi (“grove”), Cornish kelli (“grove”), Irish coill (“forest, wood”), Manx keyll (“forest, wood; grove, plantation”), Scottish Gaelic coille (“forest”), Welsh celli (“grove”), Latin scalpō (“to scratch; to carve”), Ancient Greek σκᾰ́λλω (skắllō, “to hoe, stir up”), Albanian çel (“to open up; to sprout; to hatch up; to rise”), Lithuanian skelti (“to crack, split”), Bulgarian, Macedonian, and Russian скала́ (skalá, “cliff, rock”), Czech skála (“rock”), Polish skała, skáła, szkała (“rock”), Slovak and Slovene skala (“rock”), Ukrainian скала́ (skalá), ска́ля (skálja, “cliff, rock”), Armenian քաղել (kʻaġel, “to pick; to gather; to mow”), Sanskrit कॢप् (kḷp, “to order; to manage; to perform; to create; to cut”). More at shale. Doublet of sheal. * (computing): From being viewed as an outer layer of interface between the user and the operating-system internals.
Origin
Word Breakdown
- Root: schelle, sċel, *skallju, *skaljō, *(s)kelH-
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /ʃɛl/
- British English: /ʃɛl/
Usage
Subject
Wiktionary places this term in Medicine.