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shiv

noun

  1. improvised knife-like weapon
L327667 on Wikidata ↗

Wiktionary

Pronunciation: /ʃɪv/

name

Etymology: From Siobhan and its other anglicised spellings.

  1. A diminutive of the female given name Siobhan.

    'Hiya, Shiv. It's Bobby Hogan here.' Detective Inspector Bobby Hogan. She'd asked him before not to call her Shiv. A lot of people tried it. Siobhan, pronounced Shi-vawn, shortened to Shiv. When people wrote her name down, it turned into all sorts of erroneous spellings. She remembered that Fairstone had called her 'Shiv' a few times, attempting familiarity. She hated it, and knew she should correct Hogan, but she didn't.

noun

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

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

verb

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

  1. To stab (someone) with a shiv.

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

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