shear

UK/ʃɪə/

More pronunciations (1)Fewer pronunciations

British/ʃɪː/

shear verb: to remove the fleece from (a sheep, llama, etc.) by clipping. Also the misspelling of sheer.

Verb

shear (third-person singular simple present shears, present participle shearing, simple past sheared or shore, past participle shorn or sheared)

(intransitive, transitive) To remove the fleece from (a sheep, llama, etc.) by clipping.
- shear the llamas
Synonyms:

fleece
To cut the hair of (a person).
- shear the afro off someone's head
To cut, originally with a sword or other bladed weapon, now usually with shears, or as if using shears.
- So trenchant was the Templar’s weapon, that it shore asunder, as it had been a willow twig, the tough and plaited handle of the mace, which the ill-fated Saxon reared to parry the blow, and, descending on his head, levelled him with the earth.1819, Walter Scott, Ivanhoe
- the golden tresses […] were shorn away1609, William Shakespeare, “Sonnet 68”, in Shake-speares Sonnets. […], London: By G[eorge] Eld for T[homas] T[horpe] and are to be sold by William Aspley, →OCLC
To deform because of forces pushing in opposite directions.
(intransitive) To change in direction or speed.
- The total along-the-runway wind component sheared from an 8-knot headwind to about a 56-knot tailwind over a 44-second period.1985 March 21, National Transportation Safety Board, “2.3 Airplane Takeoff Performance”, in Aircraft Accident Report: United Airlines Flight 663, Boeing 727-222, N7647U, Denver, Colorado, May 31...
To transform by displacing every point in a direction parallel to some given line by a distance proportional to the point’s distance from the line.
(intransitive) To make a vertical cut in coal.
(also 'shear off') To break or suddenly separate because of excessive force, eg. a bolt.
(Scotland) To reap, as grain.
- Soon as the bending Scythe,
  And Sickle keen, have shear'd the golden Grain,
  Array'd in all the Equipage of Death,
  Forth the stern Sportsman stalks1769, John Aldington, A Poem on the Cruelty of Shooting etc.
(figuratively) To deprive of property; to fleece.

Noun

shear (countable and uncountable, plural shears)

A cutting tool similar to scissors, but often larger.
- short of their wool, and naked from the shear1697, Virgil, “The Third Book of the Georgics”, in John Dryden, transl., The Works of Virgil: Containing His Pastorals, Georgics, and Æneis. […], London: […] Jacob Tonson, […], →OCLC
Synonyms:

shears
A large machine use for cutting sheet metal.
The act of shearing, or something removed by shearing.
- After the second shearing, he is a two-shear ram; […] at the expiration of another year, he is a three-shear ram; the name always taking its date from the time of shearing.1837, William Youatt, Sheep: Their Breeds, Management, and Diseases
Forces that push in opposite directions.
(uncountable) The phenomenon of wind shear.
- The first effect of a wind shear was detected at 34 to 42 seconds into the takeoff, at a speed of about 115 KIAS with the airplane about 3,800 feet down the runway. An average shear rate of about 2.5 knots per second resulted in an interruption in acceleration at this point with the airspeed...1985 March 21, National Transportation Safety Board, “2.3 Airplane Takeoff Performance”, in Aircraft Accident Report: United Airlines Flight 663, Boeing 727-222, N7647U, Denver, Colorado, May 31...
(countable) A specific instance of wind shear.
- We hit a nasty shear on approach and had to go around.
A transformation that displaces every point in a direction parallel to some given line by a distance proportional to the point's distance from the line.
The response of a rock to deformation usually by compressive stress, resulting in particular textures.

Proper noun capitalized: Shear

Shear (plural Shears)

A surname.
- Real people in a picture that was used by a catfish to create a fake identity could have a claim because their likeness was used without permission, Shear said.2013 January 17, Mary Pilon, “In Te’o Story, Deception Ripped From the Screen”, in The New York Times, →ISSN, archived from the original on 20 Dec 2020

Also used as

shear is also the misspelling of sheer.

shear meaning in Arabic, Indonesian, Persian and Vietnamese

shear in Arabic

to remove the fleece from a sheep: جَزَّ jazza, قَصَّ qaṣṣa

shear in Persian

to remove the fleece from a sheep: کوتاه کردن kutâh kardan

shear in Vietnamese

to remove the fleece from a sheep: cắt

Examples of shear in a sentence

Use scissors to cut them if you don't have proper shears.
During spring shearing we have to fleece all the sheep in just a few days.
The lady girt herself with silver chain, from which she hung a golden shear.

All 40 example sentences with shear

Synonyms of shear

Forms of shear

Verb
third-person singular present	shears
present participle	shearing
past	sheared
past	shore
past participle	shorn
past participle	sheared
Noun
plural	shears
Proper noun
plural	Shears

Past tense of shear: sheared or shore

Plural of shear: shears

Origin of shear

From Middle English sheren, scheren, from Old English sċieran (“to shear; to shave”), from Proto-West Germanic *skeran, from Proto-Germanic *skeraną, from Proto-Indo-European *(s)ker- (“to cut”). Cognate with West Frisian skarre, Low German, Dutch, and German scheren, Danish skære, Norwegian Bokmål skjære, Norwegian Nynorsk skjera, Swedish skära, Faroese and Icelandic skera, (borrowed from Germanic) Finnish keritä; and (from Indo-European) with Kamkata-viri ċarë́- (“to chop”), Ancient Greek κείρω (keírō, “to cut off”), Latin caro (“flesh”), Albanian shqerr (“to tear, cut”), harr (“to cut, to mow”), Lithuanian ski̇̀rti (“separate”), Welsh ysgar (“separate”). See also sharp.

From Middle English schyre (“pure, bright, fair”). Also a German surname, variant of Schier, itself a variant of Scheuer or from a cognate of the Middle English word.

Words formed from shear

Phrases with shear

Words that rhyme with shear

48 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about shear

What does shear mean?: Shear means to remove the fleece from (a sheep, llama, etc.) by clipping.
What is shear in Arabic?: Shear in Arabic is جَزَّ (jazza), قَصَّ (qaṣṣa). See Shear meaning in Arabic.
What part of speech is shear?: Shear can be a verb, a noun or a proper noun.
How do you pronounce shear?: Shear is pronounced /ʃɪə/ (UK).
What is the past tense of shear?: The past tense of shear is sheared.

Words near shear in the dictionary

Adapted from Wiktionary: shear (page history and authors); Shear (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: 2026-09-02

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-us-sheer.ogg.

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