Word.ws English Dictionary

shiel

/ʃiːl/

shiel noun: a shepherd's hut or shieling.

Noun

shiel (plural shiels)

  1. A shepherd's hut or shieling.
  2. A cottage.
    • The craik amang the claver hay, The pairtrick whirrin o'er the ley, The swallow jinkin round my shiel, Amuse me at my spinnin wheel.1792, Robert Burns, Poems & Songs

Verb

shiel (third-person singular simple present shiels, present participle shieling, simple past and past participle shieled)

  1. (intransitive) To use a place as a shieling.
    • Patrick Robertson, who shieled on the Atholl side of Drumochter, confirmed this practice: his cattle 'continued there till about midsummer, when they were brought down to his farm, having continued there about three weeks, and were then sent back to the shealing.2021, David Taylor, Wild Black Region: Badenoch 1750-1800

Proper noun capitalized: Shiel

Shiel (countable and uncountable, plural Shiels)

  1. A surname.
  2. A short river in Highland council area, Scotland, which flows from Loch Shiel to Loch Moidart.
  3. A river in Glen Shiel, further north in Highland council area.

Forms of shiel

Noun
pluralshiels
Verb
third-person singular presentshiels
present participleshieling
past participleshieled
pastshieled
Proper noun
pluralShiels

Origin of shiel

From Middle English schele. Akin to Old Frisian skiāle (“stable”) and Old Norse skjól (“shelter”). See also sheal.

Variant of Shield or Shields.

Words that rhyme with shiel

48 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about shiel

What does shiel mean?
Shiel means a shepherd's hut or shieling.
What part of speech is shiel?
Shiel can be a noun, a verb or a proper noun.
How do you pronounce shiel?
Shiel is pronounced /ʃiːl/.
What is the plural of shiel?
The plural of shiel is shiels.

Words near shiel in the dictionary

  1. Shiehs
  2. shieing
  3. shiek
  4. Shiekh
  5. shieks
  6. shiel
  7. shield
  8. shield aralia
  9. shield beetle
  10. shield beetles
  11. shield bug

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: shiel (page history and authors); Shiel (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: “shiel.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/shiel. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.