Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun A fissile rock composed of layers of claylike, fine-grained sediments.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • To take off the shell or coat of.
  • noun Clay, or argillaceous material, which has a fissile structure, or which splits readily into thin leaves.
  • noun A shell or husk.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun A shell or husk; a cod or pod.
  • noun (Geol.) A fine-grained sedimentary rock of a thin, laminated, and often friable, structure.
  • noun See under Bituminous.
  • transitive verb To take off the shell or coat of; to shell.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun A shell or husk; a cod or pod.
  • noun geology A fine-grained sedimentary rock of a thin, laminated, and often friable, structure.
  • verb To take off the shell or coat of.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun a sedimentary rock formed by the deposition of successive layers of clay

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Probably from Middle English, shell, from Old English scealu; see skel- in Indo-European roots.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Middle English schale 'shell, husk; scale', from Old English scealu 'shell, husk, pod', from Proto-Germanic *skalō (compare West Frisian skaal 'dish', Dutch schaal 'shell', German Schale 'husk, pod'), from Proto-Indo-European *(s)kelo- 'split, cleaved' (compare Lithuanian skalà 'splinter', Old Church Slavonic skala 'rock, stone', Albanian halë 'fish bone, splinter', Sanskrit kalá 'small part'), from *(s)kel- 'to split, cleave' (compare Hittite iškalla 'to tear apart, slit open', Lithuanian skélti 'to split', Ancient Greek skállein 'to hoe, harrow').

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