shear

shear is a 5-letter English word with 17 senses as transitive verb, intransitive verb, noun, and verb in the JumbleFix dictionary. One common meaning is: To cut, clip, or sever anything from with shears or a like instrument; as, to shear sheep; to shear cloth. Face value is 8 in Scrabble and 7 in Words With Friends. Use the entries below when you need a playable sense, a nearby word, or another arrangement of the same letters.

5 letters · Scrabble 8 · Words With Friends 7 · 17 senses

Definitions

1. transitive verb. To cut, clip, or sever anything from with shears or a like instrument; as, to shear sheep; to shear cloth.
2. transitive verb. To separate or sever with shears or a similar instrument; to cut off; to clip (something) from a surface; as, to shear a fleece.
3. transitive verb. To reap, as grain.
4. transitive verb. Fig.: To deprive of property; to fleece.
5. transitive verb. To produce a change of shape in by a shear. See Shear, n., 4.
6. transitive verb. A pair of shears; -- now always used in the plural, but formerly also in the singular. See Shears.
7. transitive verb. A shearing; -- used in designating the age of sheep.
8. transitive verb. An action, resulting from applied forces, which tends to cause two contiguous parts of a body to slide relatively to each other in a direction parallel to their plane of contact; -- also called shearing stress, and tangential stress.
9. transitive verb. A strain, or change of shape, of an elastic body, consisting of an extension in one direction, an equal compression in a perpendicular direction, with an unchanged magnitude in the third direction.
10. intransitive verb. To deviate. See Sheer.
11. intransitive verb. To become more or less completely divided, as a body under the action of forces, by the sliding of two contiguous parts relatively to each other in a direction parallel to their plane of contact.
12. noun. a large edge tool that cuts sheet metal by passing a blade through it
13. noun. (physics) a deformation of an object in which parallel planes remain parallel but are shifted in a direction parallel to themselves

    "the shear changed the quadrilateral into a parallelogram"

14. verb. become deformed by forces tending to produce a shearing strain
15. verb. cut with shears

    "shear hedges"

16. verb. cut or cut through with shears

    "shear the wool off the lamb"

17. verb. shear the wool from

    "shear sheep"

    Synonyms: fleece

Synonyms

fleece

Anagrams

Other playable words that use exactly the letters in shear:

asher, earsh, hares, hears, rheas, share

Common word forms

shears, sheared, shearer, shearing, shearless

Words from these letters

If you are holding these tiles, the unscrambler for SHEAR lists every valid word you can make from the same letters, including shorter plays.