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Shaft vs Null - What's the difference?

shaft | null |

As nouns the difference between shaft and null

is that shaft is (lb) the entire body of a long weapon, such as an arrow while null is zero, nil; the cardinal number before einn.

As a verb shaft

is (slang) to fuck over; to cause harm to, especially through deceit or treachery.

shaft

English

Noun

(en noun)
  • (lb) The entire body of a long weapon, such as an arrow.
  • * , (Geoffrey Chaucer):
  • His sleep, his meat, his drink, is him bereft, /
  • * , (Roger Ascham):
  • A shaft hath three principal parts, the stele, the feathers, and the head.
  • The long, narrow, central body of a spear, arrow, or javelin.
  • *
  • Orion hit a rabbit once; but though sore wounded it got to the bury, and, struggling in, the arrow caught the side of the hole and was drawn out.. Ikey the blacksmith had forged us a spearhead after a sketch from a picture of a Greek warrior; and a rake-handle served as a shaft .
  • (lb) Anything cast or thrown as a spear or javelin.
  • * , (John Milton):
  • And the thunder, / Winged with red lightning and impetuous rage, / Perhaps
  • * , (Vicesimus Knox):
  • Some kinds of literary pursuitshave been attacked with all the shafts of ridicule.
  • Any long thin object, such as the handle of a tool, one of the poles between which an animal is harnessed to a vehicle, the driveshaft of a motorized vehicle with rear-wheel drive, an axle, etc.
  • * {{quote-magazine, year=2013, month=July-August, author= Lee S. Langston, magazine=(American Scientist)
  • , title= The Adaptable Gas Turbine , passage=Turbines have been around for a long time—windmills and water wheels are early examples. The name comes from the Latin turbo'', meaning ''vortex , and thus the defining property of a turbine is that a fluid or gas turns the blades of a rotor, which is attached to a shaft that can perform useful work.}}
  • A beam or ray of light.
  • * 1912 , (Willa Cather), :
  • They were a fine company of old women, and a Dutch painter would have loved to find them there together, where the sun made bright patches on the floor and sent long, quivering shafts of gold through the dusky shade up among the rafters.
  • The main axis of a feather.
  • (lb) The long narrow body of a lacrosse stick.
  • A long, narrow passage sunk into the earth, either natural or for artificial.
  • A vertical passage housing a lift or elevator; a liftshaft.
  • A ventilation or heating conduit; an air duct.
  • (lb) Any column or pillar, particularly the body of a column between its capital and pediment.
  • * , (Ralph Waldo Emerson):
  • Bid time and nature gently spare /
  • The main cylindrical part of the penis.
  • The chamber of a blast furnace.
  • Usage notes

    In Early Modern English, the shaft referred to the entire body of a long weapon, such that an arrow's "shaft" was composed of its "tip", "stale" or "steal", and "fletching". empenne as "I [[feather, fether a shafte, I put fethers upon a steale". Over time, the word came to be used in place of the former "stale" and lost its original meaning.

    Synonyms

    * stale, stail, steal, stele, steel (arrows, spears ) * mineshaft (vertical underground passage )

    Derived terms

    (der top) * to give someone the shaft * to get the shaft (der bottom)

    Verb

    (en verb)
  • (slang) To fuck over; to cause harm to, especially through deceit or treachery.
  • Your boss really shafted you by stealing your idea like that.
  • to equip with a shaft.
  • (slang) To fuck; to have sexual intercourse with.
  • Turns out my roommate was shafting my girlfriend.

    null

    English

    Noun

    (en noun)
  • A non-existent or empty value or set of values.
  • Zero]] quantity of [[expression, expressions; nothing.
  • (Francis Bacon)
  • Something that has no force or meaning.
  • (computing) the ASCII or Unicode character (), represented by a zero value, that indicates no character and is sometimes used as a string terminator.
  • (computing) the attribute of an entity that has no valid value.
  • Since no date of birth was entered for the patient, his age is null .
  • One of the beads in nulled work.
  • (statistics) null hypothesis
  • Adjective

    (en adjective)
  • Having no validity, "null and void"
  • insignificant
  • * 1924 , Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove :
  • In proportion as we descend the social scale our snobbishness fastens on to mere nothings which are perhaps no more null than the distinctions observed by the aristocracy, but, being more obscure, more peculiar to the individual, take us more by surprise.
  • absent or non-existent
  • (mathematics) of the null set
  • (mathematics) of or comprising a value of precisely zero
  • (genetics, of a mutation) causing a complete loss of gene function, amorphic.
  • Derived terms

    * nullity

    Verb

    (en verb)
  • to nullify; to annul
  • (Milton)

    See also

    * nil ----