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shaw

Archaic Terms
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

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The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

A small wood or thicket, especially one forming the border of a field; a copse or strip of trees along a field margin.

Detailed Definition
Shaw derives from Old English "sceaga" and describes a narrow belt of trees or a small thicket, especially the strip of woodland often left along the edges of arable fields as windbreaks, game cover, and sources of timber and firewood. In the English countryside shaws are a characteristic feature of the landscape—the woody margins that give fields their definition and provide habitat for birds and other wildlife. In poetry shaw represents the intimate interface between cultivated and wild land, the boundary zone where agriculture gives way to nature. Edward Thomas's poem "The Combe" and other poems of the English countryside draw on shaw to evoke the layered, complex landscape of fields bounded by ancient strips of woodland, suggesting both management and the persistence of wildness alongside cultivation.
Example
Example in poetry:
Edward Thomas's walking poems are full of shaws — the narrow belts of woodland along field margins that he traversed on his walks through Hampshire and Wiltshire, each shaw a small world of birds and shade; A poet might write "the shaw ran along the field's edge like a footnote the main text hadn't room for — the wooded margin where the cultivated world admitted it could not account for everything"; In Hardy's Wessex the shaw is part of the characteristically layered English landscape — the field with its cultivated order and the shaw with its complex, managed-but-wild character existing in the intimate relationship that the English countryside has maintained for centuries; The shaw's function as game cover — deliberately preserved to harbor pheasants and foxes for the hunt — gives it a social as well as ecological character, the thin strip of trees marking the estate's concern with sport as much as agriculture; John Clare describes shaws with botanical precision, their flora and fauna distinct from both the open field and the larger woodland — the particular community of species that develops in the sheltered, linear habitat of the field-edge strip; The shaw's linearity — its character as a strip rather than a block, a boundary marker rather than a destination — makes it in poetry an image of the edge, the margin, the thin zone where different orders of being meet and overlap.
Additional Notes
Shaw is particularly valuable for students of the English countryside's ecological history because the field-edge strip of woodland it names is one of the most important habitats for woodland species in the increasingly fragmented agricultural landscape. Ancient shaws — the remnants of the original woodland that once covered most of England — can harbor plant and animal species that have survived only in these linear refuges as the surrounding land was cleared for agriculture. This ecological significance gives shaw an unexpected depth in poems about biodiversity and conservation. Students studying Edward Thomas should note that his walking poems are particularly attentive to shaws as the characteristic feature of the Hampshire and Wiltshire landscapes he knew best — the narrow strips of woodland that gave the agricultural countryside its enclosed, layered character. The shaw's social dimension — its role as game cover and pheasant covert on managed estates — gives it a class character that contrasts with the apparent naturalness of its ecological function. Students should be alert to this tension between the shaw as natural habitat and the shaw as managed sporting resource. Related terms: copse, spinney, coppice, holt, boskage.
Also Known As
shave copse thicket grove spinney
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