Shove
noun, verb, slang ·Common ·High school level
Definitions
- 1 A rough push.
"I rested […] and then gave the boat another shove."
- 2 the act of shoving (giving a push to someone or something) wordnet
- 3 An all-in bet. slang
- 4 A forward movement of packed river-ice.
- 1 To push, especially roughly or with force. transitive
"So, after a spell, he decided to make the best of it and shoved us into the front parlor. 'Twas a dismal sort of place, with hair wreaths, and wax fruit, and tin lambrekins, and land knows what all"
- 2 simple past of shave form-of, obsolete, past
- 3 push roughly wordnet
- 4 To move off or along by an act of pushing, as with an oar or pole used in a boat; sometimes with off. intransitive
"He grasped the oar, received his guests on board, and shoved from shore."
- 5 come into rough contact with while moving wordnet
Show 4 more definitions
- 6 To make an all-in bet.
- 7 press or force wordnet
- 8 To pass (counterfeit money). slang
- 9 To put hurriedly
Antonyms
All antonymsExample
More examples"Look, if push comes to shove I have no doubt she'll pull rank on you to get her way."
Etymology
From Middle English schoven, shoven, schouven, from Old English sċūfan, from Proto-West Germanic *skeuban, from Proto-Germanic *skeubaną, from Proto-Indo-European *skewbʰ-. See also West Frisian skowe, Low German schuven, Dutch schuiven, German schieben, Danish skubbe, Norwegian Bokmål skyve, Norwegian Nynorsk skuva; also Lithuanian skùbti (“to hurry”), Polish skubać (“to pluck”), Albanian humb (“to lose”).
Related phrases
More for "shove"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.