Definitions

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

  • noun The usually hard outer covering that encases certain organisms, such as insects, turtles, and most mollusks.
  • noun A similar outer covering on a nut or seed.
  • noun A similar outer covering on certain eggs, such as those of birds and reptiles; an eggshell.
  • noun The material that constitutes such a covering.
  • noun Something resembling or having the form of a shell, especially.
  • noun An external, usually hard, protective or enclosing case or cover.
  • noun A framework or exterior, as of a building.
  • noun A thin layer of pastry.
  • noun The external part of the ear.
  • noun The hull of a ship.
  • noun A light, long, narrow racing boat propelled by rowers.
  • noun A small glass for beer.
  • noun An artillery projectile containing an explosive charge.
  • noun A metal or cardboard case containing the charge and primer for a piece of firearms ammunition, especially one also containing shot and fired from a shotgun.
  • noun An attitude or a manner adopted to mask one's true feelings or to protect one from perceived or real danger.
  • noun A set of electron orbitals having nearly the same energy and sharing the same first quantum number.
  • noun Any of the stable states of other particles or collections of particles (such as the nucleons in an atomic nucleus) at a given energy or small range of energies.
  • noun A usually sleeveless and collarless, typically knit blouse, often worn under another top.
  • noun A thin, usually waterproof or windproof outer garment for the upper body.
  • noun Computers A program that works with the operating system as a command processor, used to enter commands and initiate their execution.
  • noun A company or corporation created by a second company or corporation for the purposes of facilitating a particular transaction, especially one that is intended to be concealed.
  • intransitive verb To remove the shell of; shuck.
  • intransitive verb To remove from a shell.
  • intransitive verb To separate the kernels of (corn) from the cob.
  • intransitive verb To fire shells at; bombard.
  • intransitive verb To defeat decisively.
  • intransitive verb Baseball To hit the pitches of (a pitcher) hard and with regularity.
  • intransitive verb To shed or become free of a shell.
  • intransitive verb To look for or collect shells, as on a seashore.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun A scale or husk; the hard outer covering of some kinds of seeds and fruits, as a cocoanut.
  • noun In zoology, a hard outer case or covering; a crust; a test; a lorica; a carapace; an indurated (osseous, cartilaginous, cuticular, chitinous, calcareous, silicious, etc.) integument or part of integument. (See exoskeleton.)
  • noun In herpetology, a carapace or plastron, as of a turtle; specifically, tortoise shell.
  • noun In ichthyology, the box-like integument of the ostracionts.
  • noun In Mollusca, the test of any mollusk; the valve or valves of a shell-fish; the chitinized or calcified product of the mantle; a conch. A shell in one, two, or several pieces is so highly characteristic of mollusks that these animals are commonly called shell-fish collectively, and many of them are grouped as Testa-cea, Conchifera, etc. In some mollusks, as dibranchiate cephalopods, the shell is internal, constituting the pen or cuttle (see calamary) ; in others there is no shell. The shell is secreted chiefly by a mantle or folds of the mantle which are developed around the soft parts, and is usually composed of carbonate of lime. It is generally univalve and spiral, as in most gastropods. In chitons there are eight valves imbricated in a longitudinal series, bound together by a marginal band. In bivalves two shells are developed from and cover the sides of the animal, right and left. (See cuts under bivalve.) Some mollusks otherwise bivalve have accessory valves.
  • noun In Brachiopoda there are two valves, but one covers the back and the other the abdominal region, so that the valves are dorsal and ventral. These shells are sometimes composed chiefly of phosphate of lime, as in lingulas.
  • noun In Crustacea, the hard chitinous or calcareous integument or crust, or some special part of it; as, the shell of a crab or lobster
  • noun In entorn.:
  • noun The wing-case of a beetle; an elytron; a shard: as, “cases or shells (elytra),”
  • noun The cast skin of a pupa, especially of lepidopterous insects; a pupa-shell.
  • noun In echinoderms, the hard crust or integument, especially when it coheres in one hollow case or covering; a test: as, the shell of a sea-urchin.
  • noun In Vermes, the tube or case of a tubicolous worm, when hard, thick, or rigid, like a mollusk's shell: as, the shell of a serpula.
  • noun In some Protozoa, a silicious or calcareous test or lorica of any kind. Such shells are present under numberless modifications, often beautifully shaped and highly complicated, perforated, camerated, etc., as in foraminifers, radiolariatis, sun-animalcules, many infusorians, etc.

Etymologies

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

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

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Middle English schelle, from Old English (Anglian) scell 'eggshell, seashell', (South) sciell, sciel, from Proto-Germanic *skaljō (cf. West Frisian skyl ("peel, rind"), Dutch schil ("peel, skin, rink"), Low German Schell ("shell, scale")), from Proto-Indo-European *(s)kel- (“to split, cleave”) (cf. Irish scelec ("pebble"), Latin silex ("pebble, flint"), siliqua ("pod"), Old Church Slavonic сколика (skolika, "shell")). More at shale. Doublet of sheal.

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Examples

  • I used to listen to the sea in that shell in the sitting-room, and I tried and tried to find a name for the sound, and all at once _song_ came into my head -- _The song of the sea in the shell_.

    The Beth Book Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius Sarah Grand

  • The Cambridge psychologist C. S. Myers invented the term shell shock in 1915 and it soon became popular with soldiers and civilians as an informal description of the phenomenon.

    Bedlam Catharine Arnold 2008

  • The Cambridge psychologist C. S. Myers invented the term shell shock in 1915 and it soon became popular with soldiers and civilians as an informal description of the phenomenon.

    Bedlam Catharine Arnold 2008

  • The Cambridge psychologist C. S. Myers invented the term shell shock in 1915 and it soon became popular with soldiers and civilians as an informal description of the phenomenon.

    Bedlam Catharine Arnold 2008

  • This produced huge numbers of soldiers unable to fight for psychological reasons—up to 40 percent of battlefield casualties by some estimates.4 But at the time, doctors thought that the concussive effects of the constant shelling somehow damaged the nervous system—hence the name shell shock.

    The Chemistry of Calm M.D. Henry Emmons 2010

  • Please be aware that even if the reinstalller does not actually care about its position when invoked, the two parts (the tar archive and the term shell script) are both needed in the same folder.

    Netvouz - new bookmarks 2009

  • These are the people who only read Harry Potter and Dan Brown, so breaking into their shell is a real battle for anyone, POD published or not.

    Superhero Nation: how to write superhero novels and comic books » Marcus Hart explains how to self-publish and promote a book 2009

  • In adult Limax maximus, the shell is a flat, elongated plate (this post has a picture of the shell).

    Archive 2009-01-01 AYDIN 2009

  • These are the people who only read Harry Potter and Dan Brown, so breaking into their shell is a real battle for anyone, POD published or not.

    Superhero Nation: how to write superhero novels and comic books » Marcus Hart explains how to self-publish and promote a book 2009

  • Ghost in the shell is a strong profound block to an answer to the greatest question, What is a soul?

    Ghost in the Shell vs. Matrix 2005

Comments

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  • If you won't believe my great new doctrine...that souls secrete their bodies, as snails do shells, you will remain in outer darkness.

    --Charles Kingsley, Letters, 1863 (1878)

    November 8, 2007

  • There I keep my treasures in a box-

    Shells and colored glass and queer-shaped rocks,

    In a secret hiding place I've made,

    Hollowed out with clamshells and a spade,

    Marked with yellow pebbles in a row-

    None of the other children know!

    - Margaret Widdemer, 'The Secret Cavern'.

    November 1, 2008

  • Janus word in the sense of add shells (or bombard "we were being shelled by the VC") vs. remove shells (i.e., shuck).

    December 9, 2010

  • See the extended discussion of "shelling" as a military punishment in the comments under rigadoon.

    September 10, 2014