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

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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

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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

Quintero helps maintain a rusted pump jack for the state oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela, on a patio adjacent to his brick shack.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 9, 2026

Outside a nearby shack Linkie listens with interest as she cleans clothes in a large metal bucket.

From BBC ● Oct. 2, 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

I get to the shack and bang open the door, expecting to see Sandy in the kitchen, fixing himself something he caught—but the stove is off, and the pan is empty on the counter.

From "King and the Dragonflies" by Kacen Callender

Moving rapidly through dense pine forests, the blaze spread to the Cap-Ferret peninsula, a popular tourist destination on the Atlantic coast long favoured by wealthy French families and known for sand dunes and oyster shacks.

From Barron's ● Jul. 24, 2026

Where beach shacks once stood, now you’ll find estates hidden behind hedges and marinas packed with yachts.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 20, 2026

Its irregular volumes, pastel colors, elevated decks, jagged rooflines and collage of materials — stucco, corrugated metal, broken tile — echo the local mashup of artist studios, surf shacks and light-industrial sheds.

From Los Angeles Times ● Dec. 5, 2025

Across the country, there are still farms operating under 1960s standards – tin shacks, walls made of baked soil or cement bricks, and no fencing.

From BBC ● Nov. 30, 2025

The Alexandra of my childhood and youth was a shantytown of mostly shacks, a few decent houses, lots of gutters and lots of unpaved, potholed streets with numbers from First to Twenty-third.

From "Kaffir Boy: An Autobiography" by Mark Mathabane

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Related Words

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

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