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ENGLISH · A WORD WITH POSSIBILITIES

shive.

A slice, especially of bread.

5 characters1 syllables approx.English language

Meaning & usage

noun/ʃaɪv/
  1. A slice, especially of bread.

  2. A sheave.

    obsolete
  3. A beam or plank of split wood.

  4. A flat, wide cork for plugging a large hole or closing a wide-mouthed bottle.

Where this word comes from

A parallel form of sheave, from Middle English schyve, from Proto-West Germanic *skībā, from Proto-Germanic *skībǭ, presumably through an Old English *sċīfe (though it is not attested before the Middle English period). Cognate with German Scheibe, late Old Norse skífa (“slice”), brauðskífa (“slice of bread”) (whence Danish skive (“disc, slice”)), Dutch schijf (“disc, slice”).

noun/ʃaɪv/
  1. A splinter or fragment of the woody core of flax or hemp broken off in braking or scutching

  2. A plant fragment remaining in scoured wool.

  3. A piece of thread or fluff on the surface of cloth or other material.

  4. A dark particle or impurity in finished paper resulting from a bundle of incompletely cooked wood fibres in the pulp.

Where this word comes from

From Middle English schyfe, schyffe, from Proto-Germanic *skibō-; cognate with German Schäbe, Dutch scheef, and Low German Schääv, all ‘fragment of the woody core of flax or hemp’. The expected pronunciation would be /ʃɪv/; the pronunciation /ʃaɪv/ is probably due to the combined influence of Etymology 1 and the spelling.

noun/ʃɪv/
  1. Alternative form of shiv.

    alt-of · alternative
Where this word comes from

Variant of shiv.

noun/ˈʃɪvə/
  1. Alternative spelling of shiva.

    alt-of · alternative
Where this word comes from

See shiva

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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.