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shale

From Wiktionary, the free dictionary
See also: shalë

English

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Etymology

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From Middle English schale (“shell, husk; scale”), from Old English sċealu (“shell, husk, pod”), from Proto-Germanic *skalō (compare West Frisian skaal (“dish”), Dutch schaal (“shell”), schalie (“shale”), German Schale (“husk, pod”)), from Proto-Indo-European *(s)kelH- (“to split, cut”) (compare Lithuanian skalà (“splinter”), Old Church Slavonic скала (skala, “rock, stone”), Polish skała (“rock”), Albanian halë (“fish bone, splinter”), Sanskrit कल (kalá, “small part”)), from *(s)kel- (“to split, cleave”) (compare Hittite [script needed] (iškalla, “to tear apart, slit open”), Lithuanian skélti (“to split”), Ancient Greek σκάλλω (skállō, “to hoe, harrow”)). Doublet of scale. See also shell.

Pronunciation

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Noun

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Shale fragments of Marcellus Shale in talus

shale (countable and uncountable, plural shales)

  1. A shell or husk; a cod or pod.
    • c. 1610s, Homer (attributed), translated by George Chapman, The Crowne of all Homers Workes: Batrachomyomachia, or the Battaile of Frogs and Mise […], published 1624:
      the green shales of a bean
    • 1834 October, Charles Lyell, “On the fossil foot-prints of birds”, in The American Journal of Science, volume 45, page 395:
      Mr. Lyell next visited the red and green shales of Cabotville, north of Springfield in Massachusetts, where some of the best Ornithichnites have been procured, chiefly in the green shale.
  2. (geology) A fine-grained sedimentary rock of a thin, laminated, and often friable, structure.
    • 2007 March 23, Patricia Leigh Brown, “The Window Box Gets Some Tough Competition”, in The New York Times‎[1]:
      As on all large green roofs, the soil is not dirt exactly but a gravel-like growing medium of granulated pumice, shales, clays and other minerals.
    • 2014 March 20, David Biello, “Fracking Hammers Clean Energy Research”, in Scientific American‎[2]:
      Five years in, ARPA–E’s priorities have shifted, too, for the same reason. The cheap natural gas freed from shale by horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing (or fracking) has helped kill off bleeding-edge programs like Electrofuels, a bid to use microbes to turn cheap electricity into liquid fuels, […]

Usage notes

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  • Before the mid-19th century, the terms shale, slate and schist were not sharply distinguished. Shales that are subject to heat and pressure alter into slate, then schist and finally to gneiss.

Derived terms

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Translations

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Verb

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shale (third-person singular simple present shales, present participle shaling, simple past and past participle shaled)

  1. To take off the shell or coat of.

Synonyms

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Translations

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Anagrams

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Chickasaw

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Noun

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shale

  1. bus
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