Shiv

/ʃɪv/ · noun

Meaning

(slang, countable) A knife, especially a makeshift one fashioned from something not normally used as a weapon (like a plastic spoon or a toothbrush)..

Definitions by Sense

1. (slang, countable) A knife, especially a makeshift one fashioned from something not normally used as a weapon (like a plastic spoon or a toothbrush).
2. (uncountable) A particular woody by-product of processing flax or hemp.
3. (transitive, slang) To stab (someone) with a shiv.
4. (transitive, slang, by extension) To stab (someone) with anything not normally used as a stabbing weapon.

Example Sentences

It's perhaps fitting that I write this introduction in jail—that graduate school of survival. Here you learn how to use toothpaste as glue, fashion a shiv out of a spoon and build intricate communication networks.

Mr. Simpson finished “If I Did It” with the help of a ghostwriter, but after a public outcry, the book was shelved, and the woman who had agreed to publish it lost her job. “Basically, I got the shiv,” Ms. Regan said in a phone interview this week.

Anyway, that's how Jimmie came to be shivved and left to bleed out in the shower.

Synonyms for shiv

Antonyms for shiv

Related Words

Word Forms

• shivs
• chib
• chiv
• shive
• shivving
• shivved

Usage Notes

Choose a synonym only when it preserves the intended meaning, tone, and grammar of the full sentence.

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