• shoal •
Pronunciation: shol • Hear it!
Part of Speech: Noun
Meaning: 1. A shallow place in a body of water. 2. A large group, throng, crowd, multitude, especially of aquatic life.
Notes: Today we are having a two-for-one sale: two Good Words with coincidentally identical spelling and pronunciation for the price of one. Sometimes words turn out to be two or more homographs (words coincidentally spelled identically) disguised as each other. Today's twins are homographs and homophones (pronounced identically, too).
In Play: These days we use the sound and spelling of shoal most often to refer to a sandbar that is likely to entrap vessels: "Popeye's boat ran aground on a shoal where he was stranded for the better part of a day." The second meaning lingers on, though, and should be on the tip of all our tongues: "A shoal of baseball fans clogged the downtown streets after the game," works as well as, "The fishermen were hoping for a shoal of hungry red snapper at the shipwreck."
Word History: The first of today's Good Words (Meaning 1) comes from Old English sceald "shallow" and is clearly related to shallow, though little is known of its origin beyond Old English. This word goes back to an ancestor meaning "thin", for the same root seems to have produced shale, the stone comprising thin layers. The second of today's words (Meaning 2) is also unrelated to Latin scola "school, place of learning", the origin of English school with the same meaning. The second word was apparently borrowed from Middle Dutch schole from Proto-Indo-European skel- "cut, divide" and originally referred to divisions of things. It is also the underlying lexical factor of scalpel. The names of thinly cut objects, like shelf and shield also fit here. So does half, by the way, which lost its initial S, but still indicates a fair cut for a friend.
SHOAL
- Dr. Goodword
- Site Admin
- Posts: 7447
- Joined: Wed Feb 02, 2005 9:28 am
- Location: Lewisburg, PA
- Contact:
SHOAL
• The Good Dr. Goodword
Not all of them are bad!In play: When I visit the shoals, I don't want to be in the midst of one.
"Well, Muscle Shoals has got the Swampers..."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muscle_Shoals
Return to “Good Word Discussion”
Who is online
Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 59 guests