Other forms: shelves
A shelf is the flat board on a wall where you put books and jars. Fixed at both ends, and always slightly too full.
The plural is shelves, and the verb to shelve means both to put on a shelf and, more usefully, to postpone a plan indefinitely. Something on the shelf is a rather cruel old phrase for an unmarried person. Shops give us off the shelf, meaning bought ready-made, and shelf life, meaning how long something lasts before going off. Geography has a shelf too, since a continental shelf is the shallow seabed around a landmass.
1nounshelfA flat horizontal board fixed to a wall for holding things.
“The top shelf is out of reach.”
Also accepted in games: shelves
A shelf was a ledge or a cliff before it was a board. Proto-Germanic skelfō covered all three, and Old English sċielfe could mean the deck of a ship as well.
Middle English
schelfe
English, today
shelf
Built from
From Middle English schelfe. From Middle English schelfe, probably from Old English sċielfe, sċielfe (“shelf, ledge, deck of a ship”), from Proto-West Germanic skilfijā, from Proto-Germanic skelfō (“shelf, ledge, cliff”), from Proto-Indo-European (s)kelH- (“to cut”), distantly related to sculpt, carve and shell. Cognate with Dutch schelf (“hay loft, haystack”), German Low German Schelf (“haystack”), Old Norse skjalf (“bench”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA