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shake

UK/ˈʃeɪk/US/ˈʃeɪk/
verbA24 meaningsVery common — you will meet it every day · #894 of 15,258leans spoken

Other forms: shaking, shook, shaken, shakes, shaked

To shake is to move something quickly back and forth. Shake the bottle, shake hands, her hands were shaking. It is irregular: shake, shook, shaken.

The two everyday collocations are worth learning whole: shake hands, and shake your head, which means no in most of Europe and North America and does not mean that everywhere. Shaken as an adjective means upset by a shock — she was badly shaken — and is a standard word in news reporting. Note the phrasal verbs: shake off an illness or a pursuer, shake up an organisation, and the noun shake-up, meaning a big reorganisation.

Definitions of shake

  1. 1verbshakeTo move something quickly back and forth.A2

    “Shake the bottle before you pour it.”

    synonyms: rattle, jolt

  2. 2verbtrembleTo tremble, from cold, fear or illness.A2

    “His hands were shaking too much to hold the cup.”

  3. 3verbupsetTo upset somebody badly.B2

    “The whole thing shook her more than she admitted.”

  4. 4nounactAn act of shaking.A2

    “Give it a good shake and try again.”

Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.

shake is a back-and-forth movement.

Phrases it lives in

  • shake off — get rid of something following you — a cold, a pursuer, a reputation
  • shake somebody up — disturb them enough that they change how they are behaving

Where it comes from

Old English sceacan meant to shake or to move quickly, and the same root gave a sense of escaping — which survives in shake off. Shaking something and getting away from it were one word before they were two.

  1. Middle English

    schaken

  2. English, today

    shake

Built from

  • sċacan · Old English — to shake
  • *(s)kek- · Proto-Indo-European — to jump, move

From Middle English schaken. From Middle English schaken, from Old English sċeacan, sċacan (“to shake”), from Proto-West Germanic skakan, from Proto-Germanic skakaną (“to shake, swing, escape”), from Proto-Indo-European (s)keg-, (s)kek- (“to jump, move”). Cognate with Scots schake, schack (“to shake”), West Frisian schaekje (“to shake”), Dutch schaken (“to elope, make clean, shake”), Low German schaken (“to move, shift, push, shake”) and schacken (“to shake, shock”), Old Norse skaka (“to shake”), Norwegian Nynorsk skaka (“to shake”), Swedish skaka (“to shake”), Danish skage (“to shake”), Dutch schokken (“to shake, shock”), Russian скака́ть (“to jump”). More at shock.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Everyday Verbs

Practise this word

shake in the wild

  • Different cultures may be more or less likely to shake hands, or there may be different customs about how or when to shake hands.

    Handshake

  • Historically shingles, also known as shakes, were split from straight grained, knot free bolts of wood.

    Wood shingle

  • Modern shingles are mostly made by being cut which distinguishes them from shakes, which are made by being split out of a bolt.

    Wood shingle

  • With video cameras, camera shake causes visible frame-to-frame jitter in the recorded video.

    Image stabilization

  • Welch revealed that the song was written within an hour and according to her it talked about shaking the regrets and the things that were haunting her.

    Shake It Out

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

the sċacan family

shake

shake — used about once every 84 pages · #894 · point at the bar for the others

  • shake your head