Other forms: shoved, shoving, shoves
A shove is a push with force behind it. Someone shoves past you on a crowded train, you shove a stuck door with your shoulder, a child shoves another in the playground and gets sent inside.
Shove also means to put something somewhere fast and carelessly: shove the keys in your pocket, shove the boxes under the bed, shove it all in a drawer and shut it. As a noun it is the push itself — give the gate a shove. Two set phrases are worth knowing: when push comes to shove, meaning when the situation turns serious and you have to act, and shove off, which means go away and is rude. Telling somebody where to shove something is ruder still, so keep the word for doors and boxes.
1verbshoveTo push someone or something roughly or suddenly.
“He shoved the door hard and it gave way.”
2verbputTo put something somewhere quickly and carelessly.
“She shoved the letters into her bag without reading them.”
3nounroughA rough push.
“The gate needed a good shove to open.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
Shove is old and Germanic: Old English scufan, from Proto-Germanic skeubana. Its cousins are still shoving all over northern Europe — Dutch schuiven, German schieben, Danish skubbe. The Lithuanian relative skubti means to hurry, which is the same idea seen from the other end.
Proto-Indo-European
*skewbʰ-
Proto-Germanic
*skeubaną
Proto-West Germanic
*skeuban
Old English
sċūfan
Middle English
schouven
English, today
shove
From Middle English schouven, from Old English sċūfan, from Proto-West Germanic skeuban, from Proto-Germanic skeubaną, from Proto-Indo-European skewbʰ-. See also West Frisian skowe, Low German schuven, Dutch schuiven, German schieben, Danish skubbe, Norwegian Bokmål skyve, Norwegian Nynorsk skuva; also Lithuanian skùbti (“to hurry”), Polish skubać (“to pluck”), Albanian humb (“to lose”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA