shikar

/ʃɪˈkɑː/

shikar noun: hunting, sport; a hunting expedition. Also the alternative form of shikari.

Noun

shikar (countable and uncountable, plural shikars)

(India) Hunting, sport; a hunting expedition.
- Where other men took ten days to the Hills, Strickland took leave for what he called shikar, put on the disguise that appealed to him at the time, stepped down into the brown crowd, and was swallowed up for a while.1888, Rudyard Kipling, “Miss Youghal's Sais”, in Plain Tales from the Hills, Folio Society, published 2007, page 25
- They climbed up the ladder, and he mounted shikar fashion, treading first on the sharp edge of the heel and then into the looped-up tail.1924, EM Forster, A Passage to India, Penguin, published 2005, page 130
A hunt.
- With us we had fifteen of the keenest and most cheerful hillman I have ever been associated with on a shikar.1954, Jim Corbett, The Temple Tiger and More Man-eaters of Kumaon, Oxford: Oxford University Press, published 1988, page 1

shikar (third-person singular simple present shikars, present participle shikarring or shikaring, simple past and past participle shikarred or shikared)

(India, ambitransitive, dated) To hunt; to go hunting.
- ‘I wish I could have made him a gun-boy. There's no fun in shikarring alone, and this fellow would have been a perfect shikarri. I wonder what in the world he is.’1893, Rudyard Kipling, “In the Rukh”, in Many Inventions, London: Macmillan and Co., page 198

shikar is also the alternative form of shikari.

Noun
plural	shikars
Verb
third-person singular present	shikars
present participle	shikarring
present participle	shikaring
past participle	shikarred
past	shikarred
past participle	shikared
past	shikared

From Urdu شکار / Hindi शिकार (śikār), from Classical Persian شکار (šikār).

48 more rhymesFewer rhymes

What does shikar mean?: Shikar means hunting, sport; a hunting expedition.
What part of speech is shikar?: Shikar can be a noun or a verb.
How do you pronounce shikar?: Shikar is pronounced /ʃɪˈkɑː/.
What is the plural of shikar?: The plural of shikar is shikars.

Adapted from Wiktionary: shikar (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

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