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shallow

adjectivenounverbcommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈʃæləʊ//
  • United States//ˈʃæloʊ//
  • Scotland//ˈʃalo//
  • //ˈʃalou//

Having little depth; significantly less deep than wide.

adjective

  1. 1

    Having little depth; significantly less deep than wide.

    This crater is relatively shallow.

    Sauté the onions in a shallow pan.

    The corpus is massive, being deeper anteriorly and shallowest where the ramus takes origin. The corpi of both sides are more closely spaced to each other than in the living form, and the symphysis is narrower.

    The two shallower fibriscesses may represent lysis due to the spread of the infection that entered the phalanx at its presumed puncture wound, the deep fibriscess on the palmar surface.

  2. 2

    Extending not far downward.

    The water is shallow here.

  3. 3

    Concerned mainly with superficial matters.

    It was a glamorous but shallow lifestyle.

  4. 4

    Lacking interest or substance; flat; one-dimensional.

    The acting is good, but the characters are shallow.

  5. 5

    Not intellectually deep; not penetrating deeply; simple; not wise or knowing.

    shallow learning

    The king was neither so shallow, nor so ill advertised, as not to perceive the intention of the French king.

  6. 6

    obsoleteNot deep in tone.

    the sound perfecter and not so shallow and jarring

  7. 7

    Not far forward, close to the net.

    Rosol spurned the chance to finish off a shallow second serve by spooning into the net, and a wild forehand took the set to 5-4, with the native of Prerov required to hold his serve for victory.

  8. 8

    Not steep; close to horizontal.

    a shallow climb

    a shallow descent

    a shallow bank angle

    The planes then flew side by side with motors wide open in a very shallow climb[…].

Etymology

From Middle English schalowe (“not deep, shallow”); apparently related to Middle English schalde, schold, scheld, schealde (“shallow”), from Old English sċeald (“shallow”), from Proto-Germanic *skal-, from Proto-Indo-European *(s)kelh₁- (“to parch, dry out”). Related to Low German Scholl (“shallow water”). See also shoal.

noun

  1. 1

    A shallow portion of an otherwise deep body of water.

    The ship ran aground in an unexpected shallow.

    A swift stream is not heard in the channel, but […]upon shallows of gravel.

    dashed on the shallows of the moving sand

    It happened that, as I was watching some of the little people bathing in a shallow, one of them was seized with cramp and began drifting downstream.

  2. 2

    A fish, the rudd.

  3. 3

    historicalA costermonger's barrow.

    You might have gone there quite as easily, and enjoyed yourself much more, had your mode of conveyance been the railway, or a hansom, or even a costermonger's shallow.

  4. 4

    slangA shallow hotel pan.

    Coordinate term: deep

verb

  1. 1

    To make or become less deep.

    The shallowing of Cenozoic age-frequency curves from tropics to poles thus appears to reflect the decreasing probability for genera to reach and remain established in progressively higher latitudes ( 9 ).

Forms

plural
shallows
comparative
shallower, more shallow
superlative
shallowest, most shallow
past tense
shallowed
past participle
shallowed
present participle
shallowing
third person singular
shallows
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).