shack

¹ American  

[shak] / ʃæk /

noun

• shacks
  plural

1. a rough cabin; shanty.

2. Informal. radio shack.

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verb phrase

1. shack up

   1. to live together as spouses without being legally married.

   2. to have illicit sexual relations.

   3. to live in a shack.

      He's shacked up in the mountains.

shack ² American  

[shak] / ʃæk /

verb (used with object)

Informal.

1. to chase and throw back; to retrieve.

   to shack a ground ball.

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shack ¹ British  

/ ʃæk /

noun

1. a roughly built hut

2. temporary accommodation put together by squatters

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verb

1. See shack up

shack ² British  

/ ʃæk /

verb

1. dialect to evade (work or responsibility)

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Other Word Forms

Noun Inflected Forms

• shacks
  plural

Etymology

Origin of shack¹

1875–80, compare earlier shackly rickety, probably akin to ramshackle ( Mexican Spanish jacal “hut” is a phonetically impossible source)

Origin of shack²

1825–35, apparently special use of dial. shack to shake

Explanation

A shack is a small, rundown building used as a shelter. To shack is to live somewhere. If you tell your parents you want to shack up with your best friend, prepare to get grounded. A shack is a tiny, crude shelter that one person might be living in. It’s not well maintained, and it probably has peeling paint and a leaky roof. A shack is a big step below a house and a small step above a refrigerator box. To shack is to live somewhere, especially somewhere that's not nice. Shacking up is kind of like crashing on someone’s couch, or living somewhere temporarily.

Example Sentences

See Examples For:

shack shacks

People stop by Amadou Gaye's shack at the market in the western town of Sukuta to use his small electric mill to grind millet for cooking porridge or the local steamed grain dish called chere.

From Barron's ● Sep. 17, 2026

One of its first beneficiaries is Aran Inthakul, 71, a former car mechanic who struggles to move after a bad fall several years ago in front of his makeshift shack on the outskirts of Bangkok.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 26, 2026

At her bamboo-and-tarpaulin shack in Cox's Bazar, Begum says her dreams of freedom sank with the boat.

From Barron's ● Jul. 21, 2026

To build it they flipped the longtime Silver Spoon diner into their modern seafood shack, alongside their business partners Donato Poto, Amy Specter Nickoloff and Craig Nickoloff.

From Los Angeles Times ● May 23, 2026

All the boys were jumping up from their mats and heading out of the shack.

From "Flying Through Water" by Mamle Wolo

As the American painter recalled years later, Borger in the 1920s was a settlement of “rough shacks, oil rigs, pungent stinks from gas pockets, and broad-faced, big-boned Texas oil speculators.”

From The Wall Street Journal ● Apr. 24, 2026

Many residents of densely-populated areas live in precarious conditions, treading through dust and living beneath tin shacks, a far cry from the lavish "Beverly Hills"-style villas of Cocody where ministers and football stars reside.

From Barron's ● Oct. 21, 2025

Tourists see abundance — the beach houses, the boutiques, the seafood shacks — but the year-round population lives in an entirely different economy.

From Salon ● Oct. 11, 2025

They slept in rickety shacks, used communal bathrooms and showered in water that “was a very nice shade of brown,” Carter remembered with a laugh.

From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 14, 2025

Nothing familiar, not a traffic clog of yellow rusted buses or a water-logged slum of zinc shacks.

From "Americanah" by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Related Words

• cabin
• cottage
• hut
• lean-to
• shed
• shelter