shaw

C2+ Topic:Plants & Agriculture

US /ʃɔ/ UK /ʃɔː/ See IPA manual

Minimal pairs

Sounds like chaw /tʃ/ vs /ʃ/

Meanings

1

noun
a small wood or thicket; the leafy tops of root vegetables

The hares vanished into the shaw at the field's edge.

Thesaurus

Synonyms

1 noun · a small wood or thicket;... thicket copse grove coppice wood

Word family

Related forms shawl

Etymology

From Old English sceaga ('a small wood, thicket'), from Proto-Germanic *skagô; cognate with Old Norse skogr ('wood'). The 'leafy tops' sense is a related dialectal development.

sceaga Old English *skagô Proto-Germanic

View etymology graph ->

Topics

Plants & Agriculture

External links

# shaw

**Type:** Word
**Level:** C2+
**Part of speech:** noun
**IPA (US):** /ʃɔ/
**IPA (UK):** /ʃɔː/

## Meanings
1. a small wood or thicket; the leafy tops of root vegetables

## Examples
- The hares vanished into the shaw at the field's edge.

## Synonyms
- thicket
- copse
- grove
- coppice
- wood

## Related Forms
- shawl

## Roots and Affixes
- Root: sceaga
- Root: *skagô

## Etymology
From Old English sceaga ('a small wood, thicket'), from Proto-Germanic *skagô; cognate with Old Norse skogr ('wood'). The 'leafy tops' sense is a related dialectal development.

## AI Etymology
Shaw comes from Old English sceaga ('a small wood, thicket'), from Proto-Germanic *skagô; cognate with Old Norse skogr ('wood'). The 'leafy tops' sense is a related dialectal development. The historical chain includes Old English sceaga and Proto-Germanic *skagô. The quoted older senses, "a small wood, thicket", "wood", and "leafy tops", supply the semantic anchors for shaw. The formation is best read as borrowed: the word shaw carries its older form-history into a compact English lexical shape. In present English it is used as a noun, "a small wood or thicket; the leafy tops of root vegetables". Related English forms include shawl. The result is a noun whose etymology preserves both the older form and the later English specialization.

## Topics
- Plants & Agriculture

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