shad

From Middle English shadde, from Old English sceadd, possibly from Celtic (compare Scottish Gaelic sgadan (“herring”), Welsh ysgadan) or from Scandinavian/North Germanic (compare dialectal Norwegian skadd (“small whitefish”), Old Norse skata (“kind of fish”)), but the order of borrowing is unclear and the ultimate origin of these words is obscure.

• IPA^(key): /ʃæd/

• Audio (Southern England)

  (file)

• Rhymes: -æd

shad (plural shad or shads)

1. Any one of several species of food fishes that make up the genus Alosa in the family Clupeidae, to which the herrings also belong; river herring.
   • 2003, Gabriel García Márquez, chapter 1, in Edith Grossman, transl., Living to Tell the Tale:

     Each river had its village and its iron bridge that the train crossed with a blast of its whistle, and the girls bathing in the icy water leaped like shad as it passed, unsettling travelers with their fleeting breasts.

2. (South Africa) Any bluefish of species Pomatomus saltatrix.

• MacBain, Alexander, Mackay, Eneas (1911) “sgadan”, in An Etymological Dictionary of the Gaelic Language‎, Stirling, →ISBN

• ADHs, Dash, SAHD, Sadh, dahs, dash

From Middle English shodde, past of shon (“to shoe”).

• IPA^(key): /ʃad/

shad

1. shod

• Jacob Poole (d. 1827) (before 1828) William Barnes, editor, A Glossary, With some Pieces of Verse, of the old Dialect of the English Colony in the Baronies of Forth and Bargy, County of Wexford, Ireland, London: J. Russell Smith, published 1867, page 66