Shroud
noun, verb ·Common ·High school level
Definitions
- 1 That which clothes, covers, conceals, or protects; a garment.
"swaddled, as new born, in sable shrouds"
- 2 The branching top of a tree; foliage.
"Behold, the Assyrian was a Cedar in Lebanon with faire branches, and with a shadowing shrowd, and of an hie stature, and his top was among the thicke boughes."
- 3 burial garment in which a corpse is wrapped wordnet
- 4 Especially, the dress for the dead; a winding sheet.
"O, bid me leap, rather than marry Paris, From off the battlements of any tower, […] Or bid me go into a new-made grave And hide me with a dead man in his shroud […]"
- 5 (nautical) a line (rope or chain) that regulates the angle at which a sail is set in relation to the wind wordnet
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- 6 That which covers or shelters like a shroud.
"Jura answers through her misty shroud."
- 7 a line that suspends the harness from the canopy of a parachute wordnet
- 8 A covered place used as a retreat or shelter, as a cave or den; also, a vault or crypt.
"The shroud to which he won / His fair-eyed oxen."
- 9 One of a set of ropes or cables (rigging) attaching a mast to the sides of a vessel or to another anchor point, serving to support the mast sideways; such rigging collectively.
"Then - a shock of water, a wild rush of boiling foam, and I was clinging for my life to the shroud, ay, swept straight out from it like a flag in a gale."
- 10 One of the two annular plates at the periphery of a water wheel, which form the sides of the buckets; a shroud plate.
- 11 A streamlined protective covering used to protect the payload during a rocket-powered launch.
- 1 To cover with a shroud.
"The ancient Egyptian mummies were shrouded in a number of folds of linen besmeared with gums."
- 2 To lop the branches from (a tree). UK, dialectal, transitive
- 3 wrap in a shroud wordnet
- 4 To conceal or hide from view, as if by a shroud.
"The details of the plot were shrouded in mystery."
- 5 cover as if with a shroud wordnet
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- 6 To take shelter or harbour.
"If your stray attendance be yet lodged, / Or shroud within these limits."
- 7 form a cover like a shroud wordnet
Example
More examples"Some say the Shroud of Turin is a photo made by Leonardo da Vinci using a camera obscura."
Etymology
From Middle English shroud, from Old English sċrūd, from Proto-Germanic *skrūdą. Cognate with Old Norse skrúð (“the shrouds of a ship”) ( > Danish, Norwegian skrud (“splendid attire”)).
From Middle English schrouden (> Anglo-Latin scrudāre), from Middle English schroud (“shroud”) (see above).
Variant of shred.
Related phrases
More for "shroud"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.