Word.ws English Dictionary

on the shelf

on the shelf prepositional phrase: laid aside.

Prepositional phrase

  1. (idiomatic) Laid aside.
    • I knew something of gunnery once, but now I'm on the shelf.2021, Bennet Copplestone, The Silent Watchers: England's Navy during the Great War
    1. (idiomatic) Unused; abandoned.
    2. (idiomatic) Tabled; mothballed.
  2. (especially, idiomatic) Unmarried, typically through lack of interest from potential spouses.
  3. (idiomatic) Injured.

on the shelf meaning in Bengali, Malayalam and Vietnamese

on the shelf in Bengali

অবিবাহিত, আহত

on the shelf in Malayalam

single, unmarried, unattached
വിവാഹപ്രായം കഴിഞ്ഞ, വിവാഹം കഴിക്കാത്ത, വണ്ട, വിവാഹം കഴിച്ചിട്ടില്ലാത്ത, ഒറ്റയായ, ഏകാകിയായ

on the shelf in Vietnamese

unmarried
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Words that rhyme with on the shelf

38 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about on the shelf

What does on the shelf mean?
On the shelf means laid aside.
What is on the shelf in Bengali?
On the shelf in Bengali is অবিবাহিত, আহত. See On the shelf meaning in Bengali.
What part of speech is on the shelf?
On the shelf is a prepositional phrase.

Words near on the shelf in the dictionary

  1. on the sauce
  2. on the scene
  3. on the scoot
  4. on the scrounge
  5. on the shady side of
  6. on the shelf
  7. on the sick
  8. on the side
  9. on the side of the angels
  10. on the skew
  11. on the skids

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: on the shelf (page history and authors); on the shelf (Bengali Wiktionary) (page history and authors); on the shelf (Olam, E.K. Kurup corpus) (dataset and license). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-au-on the shelf.ogg.

Cite this entry: “on the shelf.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/on_the_shelf. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.