Word.ws English Dictionary

shaveling

shaveling noun: someone with all or part of their head shaved, notably a tonsured clergyman; a priest or monk.

Noun

shaveling (plural shavelings)

  1. (derogatory, often) Someone with all or part of their head shaved, notably a tonsured clergyman; a priest or monk.
    • “Bonny times,” he said, “I have lived to see, when a lad of Earl Oslac’s blood is sent out of the land, a beggar and a wolf’s head, for playing a boy’s trick or two, and upsetting a shaveling priest.”1866, Charles Kingsley, Hereward the Wake, London: Nelson, page 48
  2. A shaver, stripling, young man physically mature enough to shave.

Forms of shaveling

pluralshavelings

Origin of shaveling

From shave + -ling.

Questions about shaveling

What does shaveling mean?
Shaveling means someone with all or part of their head shaved, notably a tonsured clergyman; a priest or monk.
What part of speech is shaveling?
Shaveling is a noun.
What is the plural of shaveling?
The plural of shaveling is shavelings.

Words near shaveling in the dictionary

  1. shavegrass
  2. shavehook
  3. shavehooks
  4. shaveless
  5. shavelessness
  6. shaveling
  7. shavelings
  8. shaven
  9. shaven latten
  10. shaver
  11. Shaver Lake

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: shaveling (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: “shaveling.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/shaveling. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.