Shoal

//ʃəʊl// adj, noun, verb

adj, noun, verb ·Common ·High school level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    A sandbank or sandbar creating a shallow.

    "'Twas early June, the new grass was flourishing everywheres, the posies in the yard—peonies and such—in full bloom, the sun was shining, and the water of the bay was blue, with light green streaks where the shoal showed."

  2. 2
    Any large number of persons or things.

    "Shoals of tourists"

  3. 3
    a large group of fish wordnet
  4. 4
    A shallow in a body of water.

    "The depth of your pond should be six feet; and on the sides some shoals for the fish to sun themselves in and to lay their spawn."

  5. 5
    A large number of fish (or other sea creatures) of the same species swimming together. collective

    "c. 1661, Edmund Waller, On St. James's Park Beneath, a shoal of silver fishes glides."

Show 2 more definitions
  1. 6
    a stretch of shallow water wordnet
  2. 7
    a sandbank in a stretch of water that is visible at low tide wordnet
Verb
  1. 1
    To arrive at a shallow (or less deep) area.
  2. 2
    To collect in a shoal; to throng.

    "The fish shoaled about the place."

  3. 3
    become shallow wordnet
  4. 4
    To cause a shallowing; to come to a more shallow part of. transitive

    "Noting the rate at which she shoals her water -[…]"

  5. 5
    make shallow wordnet
Show 1 more definition
  1. 6
    To become shallow.

    "The colour of the water shows where it shoals."

Adjective
  1. 1
    Shallow. archaic

    "shoal water"

Synonyms

All synonyms
schoolsandbarschoolshallowa mass ofa world of

Example

More examples

"Tom and Mary were on the verge of diving, off the left edge of the sentence, in the infinite corpus, when they spotted underneath a shoal of hungry contributors, teeth out, ready to jump on them and shred their mistakes down to the last one."

Etymology

Etymology 1

From Middle English schold, scholde, from Old English sċeald (“shallow”), perhaps from Proto-Germanic *skalidaz, past participle of *skaljaną (“to go dry, dry up, become shallow”), from *skalaz (“parched, shallow”), from Proto-Indo-European *(s)kelh₁- (“to dry out”). Cognate with Low German Scholl (“shallow water”), German schal (“stale, flat, vapid”). Compare shallow.

Etymology 2

1570, presumably from Middle English *schole (“school of fish”), from Old English sċeolu, sċolu (“troop or band of people, host, multitude, division of army, school of fish”), from Proto-West Germanic *skolu, from Proto-Germanic *skulō (“crowd”), from Proto-Indo-European *(s)kelH- (“to divide, split, separate”). Cognate with West Frisian skoal (“shoal”), Middle Low German schōle (“multitude, troop”), Dutch school (“shoal of fishes”). Doublet of school.

Related phrases

Glenburnie-Birchy Head-Shoal BrookJames ShoalMuscle ShoalsPanatag ShoalRocks and ShoalsScarborough ShoalShoal BayShoal HarbourTruro Shoalshoal grassshoaling wavewave shoaling

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