Word.ws English Dictionary

sheen

/ʃiːn/

sheen adjective: beautiful, good-looking, attractive, fair; bright, radiant; shiny.

Adjective

sheen (comparative sheener, superlative sheenest)

  1. (archaic, poetic, rare, usually) Beautiful, good-looking, attractive, fair; bright, radiant; shiny.
    • Up rose each warrier bold and brave, / Glistening in filed steel and armor sheen.1600, [Torquato Tasso], “(please specify |book=1 to 20)”, in Edward Fairefax [i.e., Edward Fairfax], transl., Godfrey of Bulloigne, or The Recouerie of Ierusalem. […], London: […] Ar[nold] Hatfield...
    • The doleful Dumps I sing, and tearful Woes,
      Of Marian teeming with unlawful Throes:
      The sheenest Lass in Berkshire was she known,
      Of all that Butter fell to Reading Town: […]1741, The London Magazine, and Monthly Chronologer, page 430
  2. (archaic, poetic, rare, usually) Clear, pure, clean; noble, illustrious; (by extension) innocent, chaste.
    • […] And all her crystal springs, whence clear and sheen
      Her brooks receive the wat'ry element, […]1822, William Tennant, The Thane of Fife: A Poem, in Six Cantos, page 48
    • 'Twas not when early flowers were springing,
      When skies were sheen,
      And wheat was green, […]1823, The London Magazine, volume 8, page 604

Noun (1)

sheen (countable and uncountable, plural sheens)

  1. (also, figuratively) Splendor; radiance; shininess.
    • There is a greenish sheen across the shoulders of his greasy black suit, for the morning light has of a sudden begun to dance through the bay window.1946, Mervyn Peake, Titus Groan
    • Mr. Leerhsen said in an interview that he wanted to write a book without the dutiful sheen of what he called “an official Bourdain product.”2022 September 27, Kim Severson, “The Last, Painful Days of Anthony Bourdain”, in The New York Times, →ISSN
  2. A thin layer of a substance (such as oil) spread on a solid or liquid surface.
    • oil sheen
    • Perhaps the simplest of sauces is the pat of butter dropped on a heap of hot vegetables, or stirred into rice or noodles, or drawn across the surface of an omelet or steak to give a sheen.2004, Harold McGee, chapter 1, in On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen, →ISBN

Verb

sheen (third-person singular simple present sheens, present participle sheening, simple past and past participle sheened)

  1. (intransitive, poetic, rare) To shine; to glisten.
    • This town, / That, sheening far, celestial seems to be.1812, Lord Byron, “Canto I”, in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. A Romaunt, London: […] [F]or John Murray, […]; William Blackwood, Edinburgh; and John Cumming, Dublin; by Thomas Davison, […], →OCLC...

Noun (2)

sheen (plural sheens)

  1. The letter ش in the Arabic script.

Proper noun capitalized: Sheen

Sheen

  1. An area of Greater London, officially East Sheen.
  2. A village and civil parish in Staffordshire Moorlands district, Staffordshire, England, on the border with Derbyshire (OS grid ref SK1161).
  3. A surname.

sheen meaning in Hindi, Urdu, Bengali and Telugu

sheen in Hindi

splendor; radiance; shininess
आभा ābhā, चमक camak

sheen in Urdu

چمکیلا, خوبصورت, آب, چمک, رونق, تابش

sheen in Bengali

উজ্জ্বলতা, চিকচিকানি

sheen in Telugu

షీన్
More languagesFewer languages
sheen in Malayalam
പളപളപ്പ് paḷapaḷappŭ
sheen in Kannada
ಪ್ರಕಾಶ, ಹೊಳಪು, ಕಾಂತಿ, ಪೊಗರು

Examples of sheen in a sentence

  • […] Would'st hear, what dims those eyes so sheen?1811, La Belle Assemblée, page 44:
  • Where the fountains glisten sheenest […] (ch. 12).1814, Walter Scott, Waverley:
  • Out upon the sheen waters of the river that lay grey beneath the starlight crept many shadows, silent and mysterious.1912, Edwin Markham, The Real America in Romance:
  • […] He receiveth blithely, and embraceth sweetly, the loathliest of all, and maketh them seven times sheener than the sun.1922, Early English Text Society: Original series - Issue 18, page 56:

All 35 example sentences with sheen

Forms of sheen

Adjective
comparativesheener
superlativesheenest
Noun
pluralsheens
Verb
third-person singular presentsheens
present participlesheening
past participlesheened
pastsheened

Plural of sheen: sheens

Origin of sheen

From Middle English shene, schene, from Old English sċīene (“beautiful, fair, bright, brilliant, light”), from Proto-West Germanic *skaunī, from Proto-Germanic *skauniz (“beautiful”), from Proto-Indo-European *(s)kewh₁-. Cognate with Scots schene, scheine (“beautiful, fair, attractive”), Saterland Frisian skeen (“clean, pure”), West Frisian skjin (“nice, clean”), Dutch schoon (“clean, beautiful, fair”), German schön (“beautiful”), Danish skøn (“beautiful”), Norwegian Bokmål skjønn (“beautiful”), Norwegian Nynorsk skjønn (“beautiful”), Swedish skön (“beautiful, fine”). Compare also the loanword Finnish kaunis (“beautiful”). See also English show.

From Old English Sceon (“shelter, shed”), from Proto-Germanic *skūrō.

Words formed from sheen

Phrases with sheen

Words that rhyme with sheen

48 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about sheen

What does sheen mean?
Sheen means beautiful, good-looking, attractive, fair; bright, radiant; shiny.
What is sheen in Hindi?
Sheen in Hindi is आभा (ābhā), चमक (camak). See Sheen meaning in Hindi.
How do you use sheen in a sentence?
[…] Would'st hear, what dims those eyes so sheen?
What part of speech is sheen?
Sheen can be an adjective, a noun, a verb or a proper noun.
How do you pronounce sheen?
Sheen is pronounced /ʃiːn/.

Words near sheen in the dictionary

  1. sheeling
  2. sheelings
  3. sheelins
  4. sheely
  5. Sheelys
  6. sheen
  7. sheen obsidian
  8. sheen obsidians
  9. Sheena
  10. sheene
  11. sheened

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: sheen (page history and authors); Sheen (page history and authors); sheen (Urdu Wiktionary) (page history and authors); sheen (Bengali Wiktionary) (page history and authors); sheen (Telugu, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); പളപളപ്പ് (Malayalam) (page history and authors); sheen (Kannada Wiktionary) (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-sheen.wav.

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