shoe
Definitions
General English
Agriculture
- verb to make, fit and fix horseshoes to the feet of a horse
Construction
- Any piece of timber, metal, or stone receiving the lower end of virtually any member. Also called a soleplate.
- A metal device protecting the foot, or point, of a pile.
- A metal plate used at the base of an arch or truss to resist horizontal thrust.
- A ground plate forming a link of a track, or bolted to a track line.
- A support for a bulldozer blade or other digging edge to prevent cutting down.
- A cleanup device following the buckets of a ditching machine.
- A short section used at the base of a downspout to direct the flow of water away from a wall.
Origin & History of “shoe”
Shoe is a strictly Germanic word, with no living relatives in other branches of the Indo-European language family. It comes from a prehistoric Germanic *skōkhaz, which is probably descended ultimately from the Indo-European base *skeu- ‘cover’. Its cousins are German schuh, Dutch schoen, and Swedish and Danish sko. Until the early modern English period shoon vied with shoes as its plural; and the archaic past form of the verb, shod, still survives.
