Word.ws English Dictionary

shamoy

shamoy is the obsolete spelling of chamois.

Meaning of chamois

Noun

chamois (countable and uncountable, plural chamoises or chamois or chamoix)

  1. A short-horned goat antelope native to mountainous terrain in southern Europe; Rupicapra rupicapra.
    • When my father returned from Milan, he found playing with me in the hall of our villa a child fairer than pictured cherub – a creature who seemed to shed radiance from her looks and whose form and motions were lighter than the chamois of the hills.1831 October 31, Mary W[ollstonecraft] Shelley, chapter I, in Frankenstein: Or, The Modern Prometheus (Standard Novels; IX), 3rd edition, London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, […], →OCLC, page 22
  2. The traditional colour of chamois leather.
  3. An absorbent cloth used for cleaning and polishing, formerly made of chamois leather.
    • I took them, breathed on them, polished them with a chamois and hung them on the chandelier.1926, Louise de Koven Bowen, Growing Up with a City, University of Illinois Press, →ISBN, page 39
  4. A padded insert which protects the groin from the bicycle saddle.

See all 6 meanings of chamois

Verb

shamoy (third-person singular simple present shamoys, present participle shamoying, simple past and past participle shamoyed)

  1. To prepare leather by working oil into the skin.

Forms of shamoy

Noun
pluralshamoys
Verb
third-person singular presentshamoys
present participleshamoying
past participleshamoyed
pastshamoyed

Origin of shamoy

From a phonetic spelling of chamois, a word borrowed from French.

Questions about shamoy

What does shamoy mean?
Shamoy means to prepare leather by working oil into the skin.
What is shamoy the obsolete spelling of?
Shamoy is the obsolete spelling of chamois.
What part of speech is shamoy?
Shamoy is a verb.
What is the past tense of shamoy?
The past tense of shamoy is shamoyed.

Words near shamoy in the dictionary

  1. shamos
  2. shamosaurine
  3. shamosaurines
  4. Shamoun
  5. Shamouns
  6. shamoy
  7. shamoyed
  8. shamoying
  9. shamoys
  10. shamozzle
  11. shamozzles

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: shamoy (page history and authors); chamois (page history and authors). 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.

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