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shear (v.)

Old English sceran, scieran (class IV strong verb; past tense scear, past participle scoren) "to cleave, hew, cut with a sharp instrument; cut (hair); shear (sheep)," from Proto-Germanic *skero "to cut" (source also of Old Norse and Old Frisian skera, Dutch scheren, German scheren "to shear"), from PIE root *sker- (1) "to cut."

shear (n.)

"act of clipping," 1610s, also as a unit of measure of the age of a sheep, from shear (v.). Scientific and mechanical sense "type of strain" is from 1850.

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Definitions of shear from WordNet
1
shear (v.)
cut with shears;
shear hedges
shear (v.)
shear the wool from;
shear sheep
Synonyms: fleece
shear (v.)
cut or cut through with shears;
shear the wool off the lamb
shear (v.)
become deformed by forces tending to produce a shearing strain;
2
shear (n.)
(physics) a deformation of an object in which parallel planes remain parallel but are shifted in a direction parallel to themselves;
the shear changed the quadrilateral into a parallelogram
shear (n.)
a large edge tool that cuts sheet metal by passing a blade through it;
From wordnet.princeton.edu