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ENGLISH · A WORD WITH POSSIBILITIES

shad.

Any one of several species of food fishes that make up the genus Alosa in the family Clupeidae, to which the herrings also belong; river herring.

4 characters1 syllables approx.English language

Meaning & usage

noun/ʃæd/
  1. Any one of several species of food fishes that make up the genus Alosa in the family Clupeidae, to which the herrings also belong; river herring.

  2. Any bluefish of the species Pomatomus saltatrix.

    South-Africa
Where this word comes from

From Middle English shadde, from Old English sċeadd, of uncertain origin. Compare Low German Schade (“shad, herring”), Scottish Gaelic sgadan (“herring”), Welsh ysgadan. Possibly from Scandinavian/North Germanic (compare dialectal Norwegian skadd (“small whitefish”), Old Norse skata (“kind of fish”)), but the order of borrowing is unclear and the ultimate origin of these words is obscure.

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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.

Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.