Word.ws English Dictionary

shock to the system

shock to the system noun: something that has a sudden and usually unpleasant effect on someone.

Noun

shock to the system (plural shocks to the system)

  1. (idiomatic) something that has a sudden and usually unpleasant effect on someone.
    • One former inmate, “Jason”, spoke of his stays in seven different institutions between the ages of 14 and 17. “At first it was a bit of a shock to the system not having your family around, and then I got used to it,” he said.2020 July 23, Chris Daw, “'A stain on national life': why are we locking up so many children?'”, in The Guardian

Forms of shock to the system

pluralshocks to the system

Questions about shock to the system

What does shock to the system mean?
Shock to the system means something that has a sudden and usually unpleasant effect on someone.
What part of speech is shock to the system?
Shock to the system is a noun.
What is the plural of shock to the system?
The plural of shock to the system is shocks to the system.

Words near shock to the system in the dictionary

  1. shock stallings
  2. shock stalls
  3. shock tactics
  4. shock therapies
  5. shock therapy
  6. shock to the system
  7. shock trauma
  8. shock treatment
  9. shock treatments
  10. shock troop
  11. shock troops

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: shock to the system (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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