Other forms: shearing, shears, sheared
To shear is to cut the wool off a sheep. Shear the flock, shearing season, sheared in spring.
A good shearer takes a whole fleece off in one piece in under a minute, and competitive shearing is a serious sport in New Zealand and Australia. In engineering, shear is force applied sideways so that layers slide past each other, and shear failure is a distinct way things break. Note the spelling against sheer.
1verbshearTo cut the wool off a sheep.
“Every spring the farmer shears his sheep and sells the wool.”
2nounsidewaysSideways force making layers slide past each other.
“The bolts must be strong enough to resist the shear when the two plates try to slide apart.”
shear is a cutting, or a force.
Old English scieran comes from a root meaning to cut. Share, shore, score and shirt come from the same cutting.
Middle English
scheren
English, today
shear
From Middle English scheren. From Middle English sheren, scheren, from Old English sċieran (“to shear; to shave”), from Proto-West Germanic skeran, from Proto-Germanic skeraną, from Proto-Indo-European (s)ker- (“to cut”). Cognate with West Frisian skarre, Low German, Dutch and German scheren, Danish skære, Norwegian Bokmål skjære, Norwegian Nynorsk skjera, Swedish skära, Faroese and Icelandic skera, (borrowed from Germanic) Finnish keritä; and from Indo-European with bsh ċarë́- (“to chop”), Ancient Greek κείρω (“to cut off”), Latin caro (“flesh”), Albanian shqerr (“to tear, cut”), harr (“to cut, to mow”), Lithuanian skìrti (“separate”), Welsh ysgar (“separate”). See also sharp.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA