Other forms: shushes, shushing, shushed
To shush somebody is to tell them to be quiet, and the word is the noise you make doing it: a finger across the lips, a long shhh through the teeth. A librarian shushes a table of teenagers. A father shushes a crying baby in the back of the car, rocking the seat and going shh, shh, shh.
Shush works as a verb and as a word thrown on its own, as in Shush, they will hear you. You can shush a person, a room, or a dog on the stairs. It is gentler than shut up and still not always welcome, because shushing an adult in an argument makes things worse rather than quieter. Hush is its close cousin and sounds softer, and hush also works as a noun, as in a hush fell over the room, which shush cannot do. A hush-hush matter is a secret one.
Shush is not built out of anything. It is imitative, which means the word is the sound itself written down, and English keeps a small family of them: shh, hush, hist. That is why children use it long before they can spell it.
Imitative. Compare shh and hush.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in A Man Called Ove, A Song of Ice and Fire
First appears in chapter 32 of A Man Called Ove.
Practise this word