shatter

verb

/ˈʃæt.ə(ɹ)/UK/ˈʃæt.ɚ/US

Etymology

From Middle English schateren (“to scatter, dash”), an assibilated form of Middle English scateren ("to scatter"; see scatter), from Old English scaterian, from Proto-Germanic *skat- (“to smash, scatter”), perhaps ultimately imitative. Cognate with Dutch schateren (“to burst out laughing”), Low German schateren, Albanian shkatërroj (“to destroy, devastate”). Doublet of scatter.

derived from *skat-✻ — “to smash, scatter”
inherited from scaterian
inherited from schateren — “to scatter, dash”

Definitions

1
To violently break something into pieces.
- The miners used dynamite to shatter rocks.
- a high-pitched voice that could shatter glass
- The old oak tree has been shattered by lightning.
To destroy or disable something.
To smash, or break into tiny pieces.
›+ 9 more definitionsshow fewer
1. 4
  To dispirit or emotionally defeat.
  - to be shattered in intellect
  - to have shattered hopes
  - to have a shattered constitution
2. 5
  Of seeds
  Of seeds: to disperse (become dispersed) upon ripening.
  - Harvesting is done much as with alfalfa, but alsike seed is small and shatters if it is not handled carefully.
3. 6
  To scatter about.
  - Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year.
4. 7
  To fall sometimes connoting hard, as if to smash something, other times light and…
  To fall sometimes connoting hard, as if to smash something, other times light and dispersed.
  - The heavens opened up, and the rain shattered down. She trailed a finger down the window, following drops of water as they splashed and wept down the pane.
  - He learned forward […] and the sleeting rain shattered down like diamonds from the brim of his hat.
5. 8
  A fragment of anything shattered.
  - to break a glass into shatters
  - it will fall upon the glass of the sconce, and break it into shatters
6. 9
  A (pine) needle.
  - They are preserved in cellars, or out of doors in kilns. The method of fixing them is to raise the ground a few inches, where they are to be placed, and cover with pine shatters to the depth of six inches or more.
7. 10
  A scattering, a smattering
  A scattering, a smattering; a quantity of something scattered, like a sprinkling of seeds or a shower of rain.
  - There's a tidy shatter of sin already in the Fee, says Parson. Ah, says I, but us can't all be saints like yourself, Parson.
8. A form of concentrated cannabis.
9. A surname.

The neighborhood

synonymshiver

Derived

antishatter, ear-shattering, earthshattering, earth-shattering, heart-shattering, nonshatter, shatterable, shatter attack, shatterbox, shatterbrained, shattercane, shatter cone, shatterer, shatterpated, shatterproof, shatter the ice, shattery, unshatter

Vish — recursive loop

A definitional loop anchored at shatter. Each word in the ring is defined by the next; follow the chain far enough and it folds back on itself. Scroll to it and watch.

A definitional loop anchored at shatter. Each word in the ring appears in the definition of the next; follow the chain far enough and it folds back on itself.

8 hops · closes at shatter

curated · pre-corpus. live cycle detection across the full graph is the next major milestone.

sense glosses and etymology drawn from English Wiktionary · source · CC-BY-SA