Definitions

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

  • noun Plural form of shaft.
  • verb Third-person singular simple present indicative form of shaft.

Etymologies

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Examples

  • It was substanceless, yet it filled up the four pink nursery walls, entering the room in shafts, structures it accepted from the windows interspersed along the wall.

    Writer Unboxed » Blog Archive » Interview: Lucia Nevai, Part 1 2008

  • This was constructed to run beside the ruts, and the horse did not occupy the middle of either the carriage or the road, but ran in shafts on one side, so as just to escape the heavy dragging fissure made by the waggon-wheels.

    Autobiography and Other Memorials of Mrs. Gilbert, Formerly Ann Taylor 1874

  • The use of the shafts is to clear out the channel from time to time.

    Glimpses of Life and Manners in Persia 1856

  • Genoese advanced with a great shouting against the foe, as though hoping to affright them by their noise, they did little enough except shout, till their cries were changed to those of agony and terror as their ineffectual shower of bolts was answered by a perfect hail of shafts from the English archers 'dreaded longbows, whilst the sun shining full into their dazzled eyes rendered ineffectual any farther attempt on their part to shoot straight at the foe.

    In the Days of Chivalry Evelyn Everett-Green 1894

  • There is an inner plane of tracery resting on clustered shafts, which is connected to the mullions of the window proper by through stones.

    Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Durham A Description of Its Fabric and A Brief History of the Espiscopal See Joseph E. Bygate

  • They mine out the coal, sometimes descending into the earth through pits, or what in your language are called shafts, and sometimes following the stratum of the coal bed into the hill.

    The Sleuth of St. James's Square Melville Davisson Post

  • The placer miners laughed at them and called their shafts "coyote holes"; but in time the placers failed, while nearly all of our gold to-day comes from veins of white quartz in the rocks.

    Diggers in the Earth Eva March Tappan 1892

  • To create a powerful current, a large furnace is placed at the bottom of one of the shafts, which is called the up-cast shaft, and the foul air is cast up it.

    The Mines and its Wonders William Henry Giles Kingston 1847

  • They set the proper kind of shafts to the pseudo-Folsom spear points and then experimented with the spear thrower.

    Galactic Derelict Norton, Andre 1959

  • It did not take Bunker long to make two handles, or "shafts," as they are called, for Bunny's wagon.

    Bunny Brown and his Sister Sue Laura Lee Hope

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