shetland
/ˈʃɛtlənd/
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 3.13 in modern English
12
Scrabble Score
8
Letters
2
Syllables
8
Unique Chars
Meaning
name
Ellipsis of the Shetland Islands: an archipelago and council area of Scotland.
name
A historical county of Scotland.
Example Sentences
- "[…] I'll tell you what else is a fact. It's a fact that he is wearing his blue Shetland turtle-neck today. Even as we speak his body is moving inside it. Warm and quick. It's more than flesh and blood can stand."
Etymology
From Scots Shetland, Middle Scots Ȝetland, from Old Norse Hjaltland, by surface analysis, hjalt (“hilt”) + land (“land”). Andrew Jennings suggests the name derives from the tribal name Calēdonēs (as in Caledonia), considering the geographer Ptolemy already called the sea north of Scotland ὠκεανός Δουηκαλεδονίος (ōkeanós Douēkaledoníos); if this is correct, the borrowing into Germanic would need to have occurred at such an early date that it took part in the Germanic sound-shift, changing *kalid- to *halit-, after which it underwent folk etymological reshaping to Old Norse hjalt (“hilt”).
Origin
Word Breakdown
- Root: Shetland, Ȝetland, Hjaltland