shock

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shock

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• choque (obsolete)

• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /ʃɒk/
• (General American) IPA^(key): /ʃɔk/, /ʃɑk/

• Audio (US):

  (file)

• Homophone: shark (non-rhotic, father-bother merger)
• Rhymes: -ɒk

From Middle Dutch schokken (“to push, jolt, shake, jerk”) or Middle French choquer (“to collide with, clash”), from Old Dutch *skokkan (“to shake up and down, shog”), from Proto-Germanic *skukkaną (“to move, shake, tremble”). Of uncertain origin. Perhaps related to Proto-Germanic *skakaną (“to shake, stir”), from Proto-Indo-European *(s)kek-, *(s)keg- (“to shake, stir”); see shake.

Cognate with Middle Low German schocken (“collide with, deliver a blow to, move back and forth”), Old High German scoc (“a jolt, swing”), Middle High German schocken (“to swing”) (German schaukeln), Old Norse skykkr (“vibration, surging motion”), Icelandic skykkjun (“tremulously”), Middle English schiggen (“to shake”). Doublet of shog.

shock (countable and uncountable, plural shocks)

1. A sudden, heavy impact.

   The train hit the buffers with a great shock.

   1. (figuratively) Something so surprising that it is stunning.

      Synonyms: see Thesaurus:surprise

   2. (psychology) A sudden or violent mental or emotional disturbance.
      • 2005, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, David Kessler, On Grief and Grieving, →ISBN, page 85:

        A tremendous shock arises when a secret is discovered.

   3. (medicine) Electric shock, a sudden burst of electrical energy hitting a person or animal.
      • 2018, Sandeep Jauhar, Heart: a History, →ISBN, page 173:

        But as was the case with pacemakers, external defibrillators were unwieldy, and the shocks they delivered—in the rare cases when patients were still conscious—were painful.

   4. (psychology) A state of distress following a mental or emotional disturbance, often caused by news or other stimuli.

      Fans were in shock in the days following the singer's death.

      • 2008, Wally Lamb, The Hour I First Believed, Ch.5, at p.112:

        ". . . Maureen, I don't feel sad. I don't feel anything. What's wrong with me?"
        "Nothing, Cae," she said. "You just haven't been able to take it in yet. Absorb the shock of it."

   5. (medicine) Circulatory shock, a medical emergency characterized by the inability of the circulatory system to supply enough oxygen to meet tissue requirements.
   6. (physics) A shock wave.

      Several reflected shocks enter the bomb core in rapid succession, each helping to compress it to its maximum density.

2. (automotive, mechanical engineering) A shock absorber (typically in the suspension of a vehicle).

   If your truck's been riding rough, it might need new shocks.

   • 1993, “Back Seat (of My Jeep)”, in 14 Shots to the Dome, performed by LL Cool J:

     We're bonin' on the dark blocks / Wearin' out the shocks, wettin' up the dashboard clock

   • 1994, Cycle World Magazine, volume 33, number 1, page 49:

     At the rear, you'll find a single, centrally mounted shock, the now-familiar single-sided swingarm and BMW's Paralever shaft-drive system, which does away with most of a shafty's chassis-jacking bugaboos.

3. (mathematics) A discontinuity arising in the solution of a partial differential equation.
4. A chemical added to a swimming pool to moderate the chlorine levels.

• → Bulgarian: шок (šok)
• → Chinese: 休克 (xiūkè)
• → Czech: šok
• → Italian: shock
• → Japanese: ショック (shokku)
• → Korean: 쇼크 (syokeu)
• → Macedonian: шок (šok)
• → Polish: szok
• → Russian: шок (šok)
• → Serbo-Croatian:
  • Cyrillic: шо̏к
  • Latin: šȍk
• → Slovak: šok
• → Spanish: shock

shock (not comparable)

1. Causing intense surprise, horror, etc.; unexpected and shocking.

   His shock announcement rocked the tennis world.

shock (third-person singular simple present shocks, present participle shocking, simple past and past participle shocked)

1. (transitive) To cause to be emotionally shocked; to cause (someone) to feel surprised and upset.

   The disaster shocked the world.

2. (transitive) To give an electric shock to.
3. (transitive) To subject to a shock wave or violent impact.

   Ammonium nitrate can detonate if severely shocked.

4. (obsolete, intransitive) To meet with a shock; to collide in a violent encounter.
   • 1832, Thomas De Quincey, Klosterheim Or, the Masque:

     They saw the moment approach when the two parties would shock together.

5. (transitive) To add a chemical to (a swimming pool) to moderate the chlorine levels.
6. (geology, transitive) To deform the crystal structure of a stone by the application of extremely high pressure at moderate temperature, as produced only by hypervelocity impact events, lightning strikes, and nuclear explosions.
   • 2018, Tim Flannery, Europe: A Natural History, page 44:

     It takes more than two gigapascals (two billion pascals) of pressure to shock quartz in this manner (for comparison, the atmosphere at sea level exerts a little over 100,000 pascals of pressure).

• John A. Simpson and Edmund S. C. Weiner, editors (1989), “shock”, in The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition, Oxford: Clarendon Press, →ISBN.

Variant of shag.

shock (plural shocks)

1. An arrangement of sheaves for drying; a stook.
   • 1557, Thomas Tusser, Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry:

     Cause it on shocks to be by and by set.

   • a. 1749 (date written), James Thomson, “Autumn”, in The Seasons, London: A Millar, and sold by Thomas Cadell, , published 1768, →OCLC:

     Behind the Master walks, builds up the Shocks.

2. (commerce, dated) A lot consisting of sixty pieces; a term applied in some Baltic ports to loose goods.
3. (by extension) A tuft or bunch of something, such as hair or grass.

   His head boasted a shock of sandy hair.

   • 1968 October 12, Paul Zindel, chapter 12, in The Pigman:

     Every now and then I’m startled at how good-looking John is, but he glared at me from under the shock of hair that fell across his brow and scared me a little.

   • 2019, Hal Y. Zhang, Hard Mother, Spider Mother, Soft Mother, Brooklyn, NY: Radix Media, →ISBN, page 2:

     On day three I pointed at the edge of an intricate pentagram peeking above her shock of oily black hair.

4. (obsolete) A small dog with long shaggy hair, especially a poodle or spitz; a shaggy lapdog.
   • 1827, Thomas Carlyle, The Fair-Haired Eckbert:

     When I read of witty persons, I could not figure them but like the little shock. (translating the German Spitz)

shock (third-person singular simple present shocks, present participle shocking, simple past and past participle shocked)

1. (transitive) To collect, or make up, into a shock or shocks; to stook.

   to shock rye

• Kosch, hocks

Unadapted borrowing from English shock.

• IPA^(key): ^*/ˈʃɔk/
• Rhymes: -ɔk

shock m (invariable)

1. shock (medical; violent or unexpected event)

Unadapted borrowing from English shock.

• IPA^(key): /ˈʃok/
• Rhymes: -ok
• Syllabification: shock

shock m (plural shocks)

1. shock

• According to Royal Spanish Academy (RAE) prescriptions, unadapted foreign words should be written in italics in a text printed in roman type, and vice versa, and in quotation marks in a manuscript text or when italics are not available. In practice, this RAE prescription is not always followed.

• “shock”, in Diccionario de la lengua española [Dictionary of the Spanish Language] (in Spanish), online version 23.8, Royal Spanish Academy [Spanish: Real Academia Española], 2024 December 10