shovel

1. 1.

   dig with or as if with a shovel

   “shovel sand”

   “he shovelled in the backyard all afternoon long”

   Broaderdig

Other forms of shovel

plural

shovels·

past tense or participle

shovelled

present participle

shovelling

Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.

Questions about shovel

What does shovel mean?

shovel means "a hand tool for lifting loose material; consists of a curved container or scoop and a handle". That is the primary sense; the word has 5 in total, listed in full on this page.

How many syllables are in shovel?

shovel has 2 syllables: shov-el. The stress falls on "shov". In IPA it is /ˈʃʌvəl/.

What is another word for shovel?

Close synonyms include shovelful, spadeful, power shovel, excavator, digger. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is shovel a common word?

shovel is banded "Common" — everyday vocabulary in speech and writing. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.