Word.ws English Dictionary

shanker

shanker noun: one who shanks a golf ball. Also the obsolete form of chancre.

Noun

shanker (plural shankers)

  1. One who shanks a golf ball.
    • Littler said he didn't shank it; rather he called it a soft pop-up, but us old hard-core shankers weren't so generous .1975, Blackie Sherrod, Scattershooting
    • He said, "Our whole club is full of shankers." […] This club was infested with shankers, as if they all had a disease. […] The danger in hitting down on the ball with such intensity is that you are likely to shank it.1993, Harvey Penick, Bud Shrake, Edwin Shrake, And If You Play Golf, You're My Friend: Further Reflections of a Grown Caddie, Simon and Schuster, →ISBN, page 57
  2. One who glues the shank into a shoe.
    • A shank-cutter cuts with a die that part of the shank which is composed of leather or leather board. […] A shanker tacks the shank in place, cuts away the superfluous upper leather gathered under the toe, beats the edge of the upper out […]1913, Leon Carroll Marshall, Chester Whitney Wright, James Alfred Field, Materials for the Study of Elementary Economics, page 202
    • I take those metal shanks, slide the backs of them in glue and make them lie down on the shoe-bottoms, […] Last week they ran a contest to see which shankers shanked fastest. I'm not embarrassed to say I beat them all.1986 March 6, "Factory Work" [Poetry, 147], quoted in 2009, Deborah Boe, The Girl of the Early Race: Poems, Gegensatz Press

Proper noun capitalized: Shanker

Shanker (plural Shankers)

  1. A surname from Hindi.

Also used as

shanker is also the obsolete form of chancre.

Forms of shanker

Noun
pluralshankers
Proper noun
pluralShankers

Origin of shanker

From shank + -er.

Variant of Shankar.

Questions about shanker

What does shanker mean?
Shanker means one who shanks a golf ball.
What part of speech is shanker?
Shanker can be a noun or a proper noun.
What is the plural of shanker?
The plural of shanker is shankers.

Words near shanker in the dictionary

  1. shankbones
  2. shanked
  3. shanked it
  4. Shankella
  5. Shankend
  6. shanker
  7. shankers
  8. shankest
  9. shankha
  10. shankhas
  11. Shankill

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: shanker (page history and authors); Shanker (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.

Last updated:

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