Shoal (meaning)

Several shoals (all pronounced as they look, IPA: /ʃəʊl/) are recorded and defined in OED. This page tries to distinguish between them.

• One group is based on the idea 'water that is not deep', very similar to its cognate 'shallow': the root of both 'shallow' and 'shoal' is the Old English sceald, which may derive from a hypothetical Germanic skaldaȝ 'thin layer'.
  • The noun 'a shoal' means 'a place [in the sea, or other body of water] where the water is very shallow', ' a place where the seabed rises close to the surface of the water'. This is commonly a sandbank or the bar that forms at the mouth of a river.
    • This is sometimes applied as a proper noun to form the name of such a feature.
  • The adjective shoal means 'shallow', which is the more common word nowadays.
    • The phrase shoal water[s] is used figuratively (and commonly literally in the past) to mean 'a dangerous context', in time or place. 'Standing into shoal waters' means 'approaching a risky time', 'entering a sensitive area'.
  • The intransitive verb 'to shoal' means 'to become shallower', and is only used in nautical contexts.
• A second pair of meanings is based on the idea of 'a host', or 'a large number of [fish congregating together]'. (The root is an Old Saxon scola meaning 'multitude', 'flock', and related to Old English scolu 'division [of an army]'.)
  • Here, the noun means 'a large number of fish [behaving socially]', and
  • the intransitive verb 'to shoal', which is used of fish, means 'to form such a social group'.

(For more detail on one matter of pedantry concerning the use of this shoal, see school - shoal.)

• OED records three obsolete meanings:
  • one as a noun meaning "A mass of floating ice; an iceberg or floe"
  • and two verbs meaning
    • 'to separate' (this is obsolete)
    • the other, also obsolete, a term of agriculture used about soil, meaning 'to crumble', 'to disintegrate'.