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shiv

nounverbattested in dialogue

  • //ʃɪv//

A knife, especially a makeshift one fashioned from something not normally used as a weapon (like a plastic spoon or a toothbrush).

noun

  1. 1

    slangA knife, especially a makeshift one fashioned from something not normally used as a weapon (like a plastic spoon or a toothbrush).

    It's perhaps fitting that I write this introduction in jail—that graduate school of survival. Here you learn how to use toothpaste as glue, fashion a shiv out of a spoon and build intricate communication networks.

    Mr. Simpson finished “If I Did It” with the help of a ghostwriter, but after a public outcry, the book was shelved, and the woman who had agreed to publish it lost her job. “Basically, I got the shiv,” Ms. Regan said in a phone interview this week.

  2. 2

    A particular woody by-product of processing flax or hemp.

Etymology

First attested 1915. From chive, chieve, chife, chiv (“knife”), from Romani chive, chiv, chivvomengro (“knife, dagger, blade”).

verb

  1. 1

    slangTo stab (someone) with a shiv.

    Anyway, that's how Jimmie came to be shivved and left to bleed out in the shower.

  2. 2

    slangTo stab (someone) with anything not normally used as a stabbing weapon.

Forms

plural
shivs
past tense
shivved
past participle
shivved
present participle
shivving
third person singular
shivs
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).