shrubs

Noun (1)

shrub (plural shrubs)

1. A woody plant smaller than a tree, and usually with several stems from the same base.
   • No trees have grown on the windswept Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic Ocean for tens of thousands of years — just shrubs and other low-lying vegetation. That’s why a recent arboreal discovery nearly 20 feet (6 meters) beneath the ground caught researchers’ attention.2024 September 27, Katie Hunt, “Scientists discover hidden ancient forest on treeless island”, in CNN

   Synonyms:

   bush

Noun (2)

shrub (countable and uncountable, plural shrubs)

1. A liquor composed of vegetable acid, fruit juice (especially lemon), sugar, sometimes vinegar, and a small amount of spirit as a preservative. Modern shrub is usually non-alcoholic, but in earlier times it was often mixed with a substantial amount of spirit such as brandy or rum, thus making it a liqueur.

Noun (3)

shrub (plural shrubs)

1. (Kenya, slang) A word mispronounced by replacing some consonant sounds with others of a similar place of articulation as influenced by one's mother tongue.
   • It is not only in face-to-face contexts that Kenyans police shrubbing; there are newspaper columns inviting readers to send in shrubs that they have witnessed, […]2010, Norma Mendoza-Denton, Dana Osborne, “Two Languages, Two Identities?”, in Carmen Llamas, Dominic Watt, editors, Language and Identities, →ISBN, page 121

See all 8 meanings of shrub