shack
1 Americanverb (used with object)
noun
-
a roughly built hut
-
temporary accommodation put together by squatters
verb
verb
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
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.
Vocabulary lists containing shack
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
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
Victor recalls his family living for years in a windowless dockworkers’ shack by the port.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Apr. 28, 2026
"It had a wood stove and no running water and a tin roof, rusted. It was a funky little shack."
From BBC ● Mar. 17, 2026
He eventually found 7 ½ West End Court in Long Branch, New Jersey, a twenty-five-foot-wide shotgun shack that sat a few blocks away from the beach.
From Salon ● Mar. 4, 2026
It’s a half-hour walk to a hut made of mud and sticks, a cook shack with a fireplace, and a field of millet.
From "Mountains Beyond Mountains" by Tracy Kidder and Michael French
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
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
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
At the moment he lives in the shadow of his former home, where other former Usindiso building residents have put up shacks in an informal settlement known as Emaxhoseni.
From BBC ● Aug. 28, 2025
It was perched unpretentiously on the edge of a donga, one of many similar shacks on Eighth Avenue.
From "Kaffir Boy: An Autobiography" by Mark Mathabane
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
