sheer
Plural: sheers
Verb
Verb Forms: sheered, sheering, sheers
- To change course abruptly; to swerve or deviate.
- turn sharply; change direction abruptly
- cause to sheer
- "She sheered her car around the obstacle"
- To swerve from a course.
- Obsolete spelling of shear.
Adjective Satellite
- complete and without restriction or qualification; sometimes used informally as intensifiers
- "got the job through sheer persistence"
- "sheer stupidity"
- not mixed with extraneous elements
- "sheer wine"
- very steep; having a prominent and almost vertical front
- "a sheer descent of rock"
- so thin as to transmit light
- "sheer silk stockings"
Adverb
- straight up or down without a break
- directly
- "he fell sheer into the water"
Adj
- Very thin or transparent.
- Pure in composition; unmixed; unadulterated.
- Downright; complete; pure.
- Used to emphasize the amount or degree of something.
- Very steep; almost vertical or perpendicular.
Adv
- Clean; completely; at once.
Noun
- A sheer curtain or fabric.
- The curve of the main deck or gunwale from bow to stern.
- An abrupt swerve from the course of a ship.
Adjective
- Extremely thin or transparent in texture; absolute.
Examples
- Her light, sheer dress caught everyone’s attention.
- I think it is sheer genius to invent such a thing.
- It was a sheer drop of 180 feet.
- Mid-game, he had to SHEER his strategy away from high-point letters to focus on opening the board.
- The army's sheer size made it impossible to resist.
- The SHEER impossibility of playing all seven tiles for a bingo motivated him even more.
- This poem is sheer nonsense.
- Use sheers to maximize natural light.
Origin / Etymology
From Middle English shere, scheere, schere, skere, from Old English sċǣre (“pure, sheer; shining, clear”), from Proto-Germanic *skairiz; supplanted the semantically close shire (dialectal), from Middle English schyre, schire, shire, shir, from Old English sċīr (“clear, bright; brilliant, gleaming, shining, splendid, resplendent; pure”), beside which existed Middle English skyr, from Old Norse skírr (“pure, bright, clear”), both from Proto-Germanic *skīriz (“pure, sheer”), from Proto-Indo-European *(s)ḱeh₁y- (“luster, gloss, shadow”).
Cognate with Danish skær, German schier (“sheer”), German Low German schier (“sheer, pure, unadulterated”; “completely, almost”), Dutch schier (“almost”), Gothic 𐍃𐌺𐌴𐌹𐍂𐍃 (skeirs, “clear, lucid”). Outside Germanic, cognate to Albanian hir (“grace, beauty; goodwill”).
Synonyms
absolute, bluff, bold, cobwebby, curve, cut, diaphanous, downright, filmy, gauze-like, gauzy, gossamer, out-and-out, perpendicularly, plain, rank, right-down, see-through, slew, slue, swerve, transparent, trend, unmingled, unmixed, vaporous, vapourous, veer, abject, arrant, categoric, categorical, complete, consummate, full, full-blown, full-bore, full-on, mere, outright, perfect, perpendicular, proper, pure, regular, right, root and branch, sheer, steep, straight-out, thin, thorough, thoroughgoing, total, unadulterated, unalloyed, unattenuated, uncompromising, unconditional, undiluted, unfettered, unmitigated, unqualified, unreserved, unrestricted, utter, vertical, wholesale
Antonyms
Scrabble Score: 8
sheer: valid Scrabble (US) TWL Wordsheer: valid Scrabble Word in Merriam-Webster MW Dictionary
sheer: valid Scrabble Word in International Collins CSW Dictionary