Sheer means nothing but that, and in full measure. Sheer luck, sheer stupidity, the sheer size of the crowd — it is the word you reach for when a quality comes unmixed with anything else.
In that emphasising sense it sits in front of the noun and stays there: sheer nonsense works, 'the nonsense was sheer' does not. A second use describes cliffs and walls that drop straight down with nothing to hold on to — a sheer drop of two hundred metres, a sheer rock face. A third belongs to cloth: sheer tights, sheer curtains, fine enough to see through. There is a verb too, mostly at sea and in engineering: a boat sheers away from the rocks, a bolt sheers off under load.
1adjectivepureNothing other than; complete and unmixed.~80%
“It was sheer luck that we found the keys at all.”
2adjectivesheerOf a cliff or wall, dropping almost straight down.~2%
“The path ended at a sheer cliff face.”
synonyms: vertical, precipitous
3adjectivefabricOf fabric, so fine that light and shape pass through it.~16%
“The windows were hung with sheer white curtains.”
4verbswerveTo swerve or break away sharply.~2%
“The boat sheered away from the rocks at the last moment.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 6 sentences found in the wild and placed 6 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Old English sċǣre meant 'pure, sheer; shining, clear', from Proto-Germanic *skairiz. A close neighbour, Old Norse skírr, 'pure, bright, clear', pushed in alongside it. Purity is the oldest sense, which is why sheer luck makes sense long before a sheer cliff does.
Proto-Germanic
*skairiz
Old English
sċǣre — pure, sheer; shining, clear
Middle English
shere
English, today
sheer
From Middle English shere, scheere, schere, skere, from Old English sċǣre (“pure, sheer; shining, clear”), from Proto-Germanic skairiz; supplanted the semantically close shire (dialectal), from Middle English schyre, schire, shire, shir, from Old English sċīr (“clear, bright; brilliant, gleaming, shining, splendid, resplendent; pure”), beside which existed Middle English skyr, from Old Norse skírr (“pure, bright, clear”), both from Proto-Germanic skīriz (“pure, sheer”), from Proto-Indo-European (s)ḱeh₁y- (“luster, gloss, shadow”). Cognate with Danish skær, German schier (“sheer”), German Low German schier (“sheer, pure, unadulterated”; “completely, almost”), Dutch schier (“almost”), Gothic 𐍃𐌺𐌴𐌹𐍂𐍃 (“clear, lucid”). Outside Germanic, cognate to Albanian hir (“grace, beauty; goodwill”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA