shoad

shoad noun: loose fragments (often of metal ore) mixed with earth.

Noun

shoad (plural shoads)

Loose fragments (often of metal ore) mixed with earth.
- The earliest mining consisted simply in collecting shoads — a means of gaining a livelihood not yet totally discarded.1915, Lionel Clive Ball, The Etheridge Mineral Field, page 37
- Eluvial wolfram was known from the Mount Carbine area 50 miles northwest from Cairns before 1895, but the black shoads were at first thought to be manganese (hence the name Manganese Creek for the little creek at the village).1968, Australia. Bureau of Mineral Resources, Geology and Geophysics, Bulletin - Issue 84, page 203

Verb

shoad (third-person singular simple present shoads, present participle shoading, simple past and past participle shoaded)

To seek for a vein or mineral deposit by following a shode, or tracing them to whence they derived.
- In shoading it is necessary to distinguish between heavy and light ores, and between friable and hard materials.1879, William Bailes, Student's Guide to the Principles of Coal & Metal Mining, page 89
- It is manifest from the position of the neck that the great mass of material removed by denudation in forming the hollow in which it is seen exposed, must have been washed down the stream in question, and had diamonds occurred in that mass it is highly improbable that none should have been left in...1889, Records of the Geological Survey of India, page 41
To be distributed as shoads.
- Among the fragments shoaded down the sloping surface of the ground are pieces of edgewise intraformational conglomerate.1941, Royal Society of South Australia, Transactions of the Royal Society of South Australia, page 307
- The discovery of davidite at Radium Hill was made in 1906, by Mr. A. J. Smith, who mistook the black shoaded mineral for tin ore.1958, Australian Atomic Energy Commission, Australian Atomic Energy Symposium, 1958, page 44

Examples of shoad in a sentence

As mentioned above, many of the important tin streams are well away from any outcropping tin lodes, hence shoad, so Carew oversimplified his account.1986, Roger David Penhallurick, Tin in Antiquity, page 164:
In search of alluvial shoad, the miners studied the landscape, the color and nature of earths, and embedded rocks beside streams and rivers.2005, Warren Alexander Dym, Divining science, page 143:
Before developing a streamworks, the quality, depth and lateral extent of the shoad would have to be tested through strategically placed excavations.2008, Peter C. Herring, Peter Rose, Nicholas Johnson, Bodmin Moor: An Archaeological Survey - Volume 2, page 31:
Several outcrops were originally pegged in the hope that the shoaded black mineral would prove to be tin ore.2013, Arthur John Gaskin, H. R. Samson, Ceramic and Refractory Clays of South Australia, page 7:

Forms of shoad

Noun
plural	shoads
alternative form	shode
Verb
third-person singular present	shoads
present participle	shoading
past participle	shoaded
past	shoaded

Origin of shoad

From Middle English shode, schode, from Old English ġescēad (“separation, distinction, discretion, understanding, argument, reason, reckoning, account, statement, accuracy, art, manner, method”), from Proto-Germanic *skaidą (“separation, distinction”), from Proto-Indo-European *skey- (“to cut, divide, separate”). Related to Old English scādan (“to separate, divide, part, make a line of separation between”). More at shed.

Words formed from shoad

Questions about shoad

What does shoad mean?: Shoad means loose fragments (often of metal ore) mixed with earth.
How do you use shoad in a sentence?: As mentioned above, many of the important tin streams are well away from any outcropping tin lodes, hence shoad, so Carew oversimplified his account.
What part of speech is shoad?: Shoad can be a noun or a verb.
What is the plural of shoad?: The plural of shoad is shoads.

Words near shoad in the dictionary

Adapted from Wiktionary: shoad (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: “shoad.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/shoad. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.