shelf1
/ʃɛlf
/noun (plural shelves /ʃɛlvz/)
1A flat length of wood or rigid material, attached to a wall or forming part of a piece of furniture, that provides a surface for the storage or display of objects.The pieces were displayed on shelves, propped against the wall, emphasizing their three-dimensionality....
- The painters, who had promised me two days notice to remove everything from walls, shelves and large pieces of furniture, instead gave me a few hours.
- Free-standing shelves provide excellent storage and can be taken with you when you move.
Synonyms
ledge, bracket, sill, rack;
bookshelf, mantelshelf, mantelpiece;
shelving;
in a church or monastery predella, retable
2A ledge of rock or protruding strip of land.There were, broadly speaking, three tracts of relevant land: there is the rock shelf, which was tidal…...
- A dusty pile of sheet rock tumbled from one of the high, unsteady shelves and landed beside Barbara.
- I pull the rope bag out and drop it on the ledge in front of my shins, padding the rock shelf so I can lean into it.
2.1A submarine bank, or a part of the continental shelf.This problem with the sediment trap technique is probably restricted to the continental slope and shelf and will not occur over abyssal depths....
- Recruitment patterns of these species along the shelf were then used to infer water-mass distributions along the shelf.
- Zebra sharks are primarily bottom dwellers that live in warm shallow inland waters, of continental and island shelves.
Synonyms
sandbank, sandbar, bank, bar, reef, shoal
Phrases
off the shelf
on the shelf
Derivatives
shelf-ful
- Yet in the midst of all this I also have several shelf-fuls of gifts which he will not use.
- This section contains a shelf-ful of really good ones, both fiction (by Muslim authors) and nonfiction.
- For instance, I have a shelf-ful of electronic gizmos - bought and paid-for - that I have never managed to make use of.
shelf-like
- Running a trot line seems a fairly sane way to go about snagging a big fish, but in more shallow runs of the river farther downstream where the limestone has eroded under the bank to form shelf-like caves some guys take the sport a step farther.
- The nose contains shelf-like structures called turbinates, which help trap particles entering the nasal passages.
- Podial basins are closed cup-like or shelf-like depressions shared by sequential ambulacrals or adjacent ambulacrals and adambulacrals.
Origin
Middle English: from Middle Low German schelf; related to Old English scylfe 'partition', scylf 'crag'.
Shelf is from Middle Low German schelf; related forms are Old English scylfe ‘partition’, scylf ‘crag’. The late 16th-century verb shelve had the sense ‘project like a shelf’, first found in Shakespeare's Two Gentlemen of Verona: ‘Her chamber is aloft. And built so shelving, that one cannot climb it’. The form is from shelves, the plural of shelf.
Rhymes
shelf2
/ʃɛlf/Australian /NZ informal
noun (plural shelfs)
An informer.
verb [with object]
Inform on (someone): he never shelfed a man in his life
Origin
1930s (as a noun): probably from the phrase on the shelf 'out of the way'.