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shatter

Pronunciation: /ˈʃætə/

The English word “shatter” has 10 meanings listed here.

verb

  1. Of brittle solid materials (like glass or ice), to violently break into pieces.
  2. To destroy, disable.
  3. To dispirit or emotionally defeat.
  4. Of seeds: to disperse (become dispersed) upon ripening.
  5. To scatter about.
  6. To fall sometimes connoting hard, as if to smash something, other times light and dispersed.

noun

  1. A fragment of anything shattered.
  2. A (pine) needle.
  3. A scattering, a smattering; a quantity of something scattered, like a sprinkling of seeds or a shower of rain.
  4. A form of concentrated cannabis.

Etymology

From Middle English schateren (“to scatter, dash”), an assibilated form of Middle English scateren ("to scatter"; see scatter), from Old English scaterian, from Proto-Germanic *skat- (“to smash, scatter”), perhaps ultimately imitative. Cognate with Dutch schateren (“to burst out laughing”), Low German schateren, Albanian shkatërroj (“to destroy, devastate”). Doublet of scatter.

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Definitions are from Wiktionary, extracted by Kaikki.org, and are available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.