Shaky means unsteady, or not to be relied on. A shaky hand, shaky ground, a shaky start.
The physical sense covers hands, legs and voices — shaky with nerves, shaky after the fall. The figurative sense is about reliability: shaky evidence, a shaky argument, on shaky ground. A shaky start means a bad beginning that may still be recovered. Note shakily; and that shaky footage is the standard complaint about handheld video.
1adjectiveshakyUnsteady.
“The old ladder felt shaky, so I asked my brother to hold it.”
2adjectivereliedNot to be relied on.
“His English is still a bit shaky, but he can order food and ask for directions.”
shaky is a quality of unsteadiness.
Middle English
schaken
English
shake
English, today
shaky
Built from
From shake + -y. shake comes 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