Word.ws English Dictionary

shack

/ʃæk/

shack noun: a crude, roughly built hut or cabin. Also the alternative form of shag.

shack: a crude, roughly built hut or cabin
Image: Daniel Kraft, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun (1)

shack (plural shacks)

  1. A crude, roughly built hut or cabin.
    • The men resided in a huge bunk house, which consisted of one room only, with a shack outside where the cooking was done. In the large room were a dozen bunks ; half of them in a very dishevelled state, […]1913, Robert Barr, chapter 6, in Lord Stranleigh Abroad
    Synonyms:
    hovel, shanty, camp
  2. Any poorly constructed or poorly furnished building.
    • The stations are generally very poor, even for a branch line; some are mere wooden shacks, and Moniaive itself is one of the least prepossessing terminal stations I have ever seen.1944 January and February, E. R. McCarter, “The Cairn Valley Light Railway”, in Railway Magazine, page 48
  3. (slang) The room from which a ham radio operator transmits.

Verb (1)

shack (third-person singular simple present shacks, present participle shacking, simple past and past participle shacked)

  1. To live (in or with); to shack up.

Noun (2)

shack (countable and uncountable, plural shacks)

  1. (obsolete) Grain fallen to the ground and left after harvest.
  2. (obsolete) Nuts which have fallen to the ground.
  3. (obsolete) Freedom to pasturage in order to feed upon shack.
    • […] first comes the case of tenants with a customary right to shack their sheep and cattle who have overburdened the fields with a larger number of beasts than their tenement entitles them to, or who have allowed their beasts to feed in the field out of shack time.1918, Christobel Mary Hoare Hood, The History of an East Anglian Soke http://books.google.com/books?ie=UTF-8&hl=en&vid=OCLC11859773&id=rI0iE-yqyAMC&q=%22right+to+shack%22&prev=http://books.google.com/...
    • The fields were enclosed by Act in 1791, and Tharp gave the cottagers about thirteen acres for their right of shack.1996, J M Neeson, Commoners http://books.google.com/books?ie=UTF-8&hl=en&vid=ISBN0521567742&id=2CqhjjiwLtEC&pg=PA76&lpg=PA76&sig=3geUREguU3vTYj_05PtAfzFODDA
  4. (UK, US, dialectal, obsolete) A shiftless fellow; a low, itinerant beggar; a vagabond; a tramp.
    • Some peple hev a fakilty two get along into the world, whilst others air poor shacks & good for nothing.1866, Betsey Jane Ward, Book of Goaks
    • All the poor old shacks about the town found a friend in Deacon Marble.1868, Henry Ward Beecher, Norwood, or Village Life in New England
  5. Bait that can be picked up at sea.
  6. (Nigeria, slang) A drink, especially an alcoholic one.

Verb (2)

shack (third-person singular simple present shacks, present participle shacking, simple past and past participle shacked)

  1. (obsolete) To shed or fall, as corn or grain at harvest.
  2. (obsolete) To feed in stubble, or upon waste.
    • They [turkeys] are then sold‥to the larger farmers to ‘shack’ upon the barley or oat stubbles.1867, “Journal of the Royal Agriculatural Socirty”, in (Please provide the book title or journal name)
    • […] first comes the case of tenants with a customary right to shack their sheep and cattle who have overburdened the fields with a larger number of beasts than their tenement entitles them to, or who have allowed their beasts to feed in the field out of shack time.1918, Christobel Mary Hoare Hood, The History of an East Anglian Soke http://books.google.com/books?ie=UTF-8&hl=en&vid=OCLC11859773&id=rI0iE-yqyAMC&q=%22right+to+shack%22&prev=http://books.google.com/...
  3. (UK, dialectal) To wander as a vagabond or tramp.
  4. (US, intransitive) To hibernate; to go into winter quarters.
  5. (Nigeria, slang) To drink, especially alcohol.

Proper noun capitalized: Shack

Shack (plural Shacks)

  1. A surname.

Also used as

shack is also the alternative form of shag.

shack meaning in Hindi, Urdu, Malayalam and Arabic

shack in Hindi

crude hut
झुग्गी jhuggī, झुगिया jhugiyā, झोपड़ी jhopṛī, कुटिया kuṭiyā

shack in Urdu

crude hut
جھون٘پْڑی jhõpṛī

shack in Malayalam

ഷാക്ക്

shack in Arabic

crude hut
كُوخ kūḵ, تَخْشِيبَة taḵšība
More languagesFewer languages
shack in Malay
pondok
shack in Indonesian
gubuk
shack in Thai
กระต๊อบ grà-dtɔ́p, กระท่อม grà-tɔ̂m, ตูบ dtùup
shack in Vietnamese
chòi, lán
shack in Myanmar
တဲ tai:

Examples of shack in a sentence

  • They lived in a tumbledown shack on the edge of the woods.
  • The livability of the shack was questioned, but the old man had lived there for 50 years.
  • Farther down the beach they saw a weather-beaten shack and an upturned boat.

All 40 example sentences with shack

Synonyms of shack

Forms of shack

Noun
pluralshacks
Verb
third-person singular presentshacks
present participleshacking
past participleshacked
pastshacked
Adjective
comparativemore shack
superlativemost shack
Proper noun
pluralShacks

Plural of shack: shacks

Origin of shack

Unknown. Some scholars derive this word from Mexican Spanish jacal, from Nahuatl xacalli (“adobe hut”). Alternatively, the word may instead come from ramshackle/ramshackly (e.g., old ramshackly house) or perhaps it may be a back-formation from shackly. Compare Tavringer Romani hak (“place, house”), Traveller Norwegian hak (“place”).

Obsolete variant of shake. Compare Scots shag (“refuse of barley or oats”).

From shagged or shagged out.

Words formed from shack

Phrases with shack

Words that rhyme with shack

48 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about shack

What does shack mean?
Shack means a crude, roughly built hut or cabin.
What is shack in Hindi?
Shack in Hindi is झुग्गी (jhuggī), झुगिया (jhugiyā), झोपड़ी (jhopṛī). See Shack meaning in Hindi.
What part of speech is shack?
Shack can be a noun, a verb or a proper noun.
How do you pronounce shack?
Shack is pronounced /ʃæk/.
What is the plural of shack?
The plural of shack is shacks.

Words near shack in the dictionary

  1. Shache
  2. Shachi
  3. Shachtmanism
  4. Shachtmanite
  5. Shachtmanites
  6. shack
  7. shack rat
  8. shack rats
  9. shack up
  10. shack-shack
  11. shack-shacks

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: shack (page history and authors); Shack (page history and authors); shack (Malayalam, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model 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: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-shack.wav.

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