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Shatter

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shatter¹

  • /ˈʃætə/ Australia, UK
  • /ˈʃatə/ British, Northern England, Southern, Standard, Wales
  • /ˈʃɛtə/ New Zealand
  • /ˈʃætɚ/ US
  • [ˈʃæɾɚ] US
  • /ˈʃatəɾ/ Scotland

Rhymes with -ætə(ɹ)

Where it comes from

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.

verb shatters · shattering · shattered

  1. ergative Of brittle solid materials (like glass or ice), to violently break into pieces. The miners used dynamite to shatter rocks.
  2. transitive To destroy, disable.
  3. transitive To dispirit or emotionally defeat. to be shattered in intellect
  4. intransitive 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.
  5. obsolete, transitive To scatter about. Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year.
  6. intransitive To fall sometimes connoting hard, as if to smash something, other times light and dispersed. Bulletlike rain shattered down. Instantly, Willy was soaked to the skin. Then her right foot skidded out before her, and she felt her balance begin to go. Inevitably and with shocking swiftness came the moment when her body obeyed gravity[…]

Similar: shiver

noun shatters

  1. archaic, countable A fragment of anything shattered. to break a glass into shatters
  2. countable, uncountable A (pine) needle. My usual habit is, as soon as I get my wheat trodden out, and my corn secured in the fall, to litter my farm yard (and if my cultivation is far off, I select some warm spot near the field) with leaves and pine shatters, (preferring the former) ...
  3. countable, uncountable 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.
  4. slang, uncountable A form of concentrated cannabis.

Shatter²

proper noun

  1. A surname.

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