Word.ws English Dictionary

shinny

/ˈʃɪni/

shinny verb: to climb in an awkward manner.

Verb

shinny (third-person singular simple present shinnies, present participle shinnying, simple past and past participle shinnied)

  1. (intransitive) To climb in an awkward manner.
    Synonyms:
    shimmy, shin

Noun (1)

shinny (uncountable)

  1. (Canada) An informal game of pickup hockey played with minimal equipment: skates, sticks and a puck or ball.
    • In shinny, everyone wins. Though rules are scaled back, the game is not loosened beyond all form, and the driving competitive element remains.2010, Jason Blake, Canadian Hockey Literature: A Thematic Study, University of Toronto Press (cloth-bound) (paperback), chapter two: “The Hockey Dream: Hockey as Escape, Freedom, Utopia”, page 63
    • Hockey fiction shows that the focus on ludus in organized hockey threatens to strangle the primal play spirit, which is why shinny is more easily romanticized than versions of the game that seem to require fighting, that motivate parents to violence, and, at the highest level, give rise to lockouts...2010, ibidem, page 70
  2. (Canada) Street hockey.
  3. (Canada, informal) Hockey.
  4. (US) A hockey-like game played by American Indians.

Noun (2)

shinny (uncountable)

  1. Moonshine. (illegal alcohol)
    • Miss Maudie Atkinson baked a Lane cake so loaded with shinny it made me tight;....1960 July 11, Harper Lee, chapter 13, in To Kill a Mockingbird, Philadelphia, Pa.; New York, N.Y.: J[oshua] B[allinger] Lippincott Company, →OCLC
    • He sent them packing next day armed with their charts and five quarts of shinny in their saddlebags—two apiece and one for the Governor.1960 July 11, Harper Lee, chapter 13, in To Kill a Mockingbird, Philadelphia, Pa.; New York, N.Y.: J[oshua] B[allinger] Lippincott Company, →OCLC

Synonyms of shinny

Forms of shinny

third-person singular presentshinnies
present participleshinnying
past participleshinnied
pastshinnied

Origin of shinny

From shin (noun) + -y.

Variation of shinty.

Questions about shinny

What does shinny mean?
Shinny means to climb in an awkward manner.
What part of speech is shinny?
Shinny can be a verb or a noun.
How do you pronounce shinny?
Shinny is pronounced /ˈʃɪni/.
What is the past tense of shinny?
The past tense of shinny is shinnied.

Words near shinny in the dictionary

  1. shinnied
  2. shinnies
  3. shinning
  4. shinning out
  5. Shinns
  6. shinny
  7. shinnying
  8. Shino ware
  9. Shino wares
  10. shinobi
  11. shinobi-iri

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: shinny (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:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-shinny.wav.

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