Definitions

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

  • noun A husk, pod, or shell of a seed, nut, or fruit, such as a pecan or an ear of corn.
  • noun A shell of a bivalve, such as an oyster or clam.
  • noun The exoskeleton or pupal case of an insect larva or nymph, especially one that has been shed.
  • noun Informal Something worthless.
  • transitive verb To remove the husk or shell from.
  • transitive verb To open the shell of (a bivalve).
  • transitive verb Informal To cast off.
  • interjection Used to express mild disappointment, disgust, or annoyance.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • To shake.
  • A call to pigs.
  • noun The devil.
  • noun A shock; a stook.
  • noun A husk or pod: used especially of the epicarp of hickory-nuts and walnuts, the prickly involucre of chestnuts, etc., also, in England, of the pods of peas, etc., and, in some parts of the United States, of the husks of maize.
  • noun The shell of the oyster.
  • noun A case or covering, as that of the larva of a caddis-fly.
  • To remove the husk, pod, or shell from: in the United States said especially of the husking of corn or the shelling of oysters.
  • To take; strip: with off.

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

  • noun Prev. Eng. A shock of grain.
  • transitive verb To deprive of the shucks or husks
  • transitive verb colloq. To remove or take off (shucks); hence, to discard; to lay aside; -- usually with off.
  • noun A shell, husk, or pod; especially, the outer covering of such nuts as the hickory nut, butternut, peanut, and chestnut.
  • noun United States The shell of an oyster or clam.

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

  • noun The shell or husk, especially of grains (e.g. corn/maize) or nuts (e.g. walnuts).
  • noun slang, African American Vernacular A fraud; a scam.
  • noun slang A phony.
  • verb transitive To remove the shuck from (walnuts, oysters, etc.).
  • verb transitive To remove (any outer covering).
  • verb transitive, intransitive, slang To fool; to hoax.

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

  • verb remove from the shell
  • verb remove the shucks from
  • noun material consisting of seed coverings and small pieces of stem or leaves that have been separated from the seeds

Etymologies

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

[Origin unknown. Interj., alteration of shit.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Origin unknown.

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Examples

Comments

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  • "sure wasn't he that drunk he fell in the shuck" also spelled shugh

    March 21, 2007

  • "This, then, was my bedroom and workroom. There were five beds in it, each with its own shapeless mattress made of coarse homespun and filled with corn shucks. The shucks were astonishingly noisy and the homespun was very hard on the skin, especially sunburnt skin, but the mattresses were always beautifully cool."

    - 'The Madwoman's Underclothes', Germaine Greer.

    March 26, 2008