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shearing

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

The annual process of cutting the fleece from sheep; a central event in the pastoral calendar marking the transition from spring to summer.

Detailed Definition
Shearing describes the seasonal operation—typically performed in late spring or early summer—when sheep are caught, restrained, and their wool fleeces cut away with hand shears or clippers. In traditional communities shearing was a major communal event requiring many hands and generating a festive atmosphere alongside hard physical labor. Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale includes a famous sheep-shearing feast scene that captures this festive dimension. In poetry shearing marks the point at which the year's pastoral wealth—the fleece—is harvested, transforming living animals into economic resources. The vulnerability of the shorn sheep—naked, slightly dazed—provides a powerful image of exposure and humility that poets have used in both secular and religious contexts, the sheep's fleece connecting through the Golden Fleece myth to themes of quest and reward.
Example
Example in poetry:
The communal nature of shearing — in traditional farming a major cooperative event requiring many hands and generating festive celebration alongside hard physical labor — makes it a natural subject for poems about community and collective joy; Shakespeare's Winter's Tale includes a sheep-shearing feast of extraordinary festive energy — Autolycus's songs, Perdita's flowers, the dancing — that suggests the real festivity that surrounded this annual agricultural event; A poet might write "the shearing shed filled with the sound of hand-shears and the particular silence of the shorn sheep, bewildered and lighter, its year's work taken from its back in one long unbroken peel"; The vulnerability of the newly shorn sheep — naked, slightly dazed, reduced from its winter bulk to its essential lean form — provides a powerful image of exposure and humility that has attracted religious poets: the lamb of God shorn of glory as the sheep is shorn of fleece; In poems about seasonal labor and its rhythms, shearing marks the transition from spring to summer — the year's woolly abundance harvested, the animals lightened for the warm months, the farmer's return on the year's shepherding made tangible; The craft of shearing — the skilled shearer's ability to take off the entire fleece in one piece, the blade moving in long smooth strokes — appears in poems about traditional skills and their celebration, the shearer's art as worthy of poetic attention as any other form of human mastery.
Additional Notes
Shearing is one of the most socially and culturally rich terms in the agricultural vocabulary, representing a dimension of traditional farm life — the communal festival surrounding major seasonal operations — that pastoral poetry both celebrates and idealizes. Students should understand that the sheep-shearing feast was a real institution in English farm communities, when the bringing together of many workers for a labor-intensive operation created the social conditions for celebration, music, and courtship. Shakespeare's sheep-shearing scene in The Winter's Tale (Act IV, Scene iv) is the most elaborate literary treatment and should be read by all students as evidence of the festive tradition's vitality in the early seventeenth century. Students should also attend to the technical aspects of shearing — the skill required to take off the entire fleece in one piece, the different techniques for different breeds, the transition from hand shears to machine clipping — since technical precision can enrich literary analysis. The vulnerability of the shorn sheep — its sudden nakedness, its reduced weight, its apparent bewilderment — has attracted religious poets for centuries, the analogy with spiritual humility and sacrifice being too obvious to avoid. Related terms: fleece, fold, lambing, herd, stall.
Other Meanings of “shearing”
Also Known As
clipping fleecing wool-cutting clip fleece
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