Shoad

noun, verb

noun, verb ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    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."

Verb
  1. 1
    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."

  2. 2
    To be distributed as shoads.

    "Among the fragments shoaded down the sloping surface of the ground are pieces of edgewise intraformational conglomerate."

Synonyms

All synonyms

Example

More examples

"The earliest mining consisted simply in collecting shoads — a means of gaining a livelihood not yet totally discarded."

Etymology

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.

Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.