Definition of SHREW

Examples of shrew in a Sentence

Noun Rip Van Winkle went off into the mountains to escape his wife, a shrew who made his life miserable.

Recent Examples on the Web: Noun Smith and paleontologist Kenneth Angielczyk turned instead to 16 hero shrew specimens already in the Field Museum’s collections. — Katherine J. Wu, Smithsonian Magazine, "Hero Shrews’ Extreme, Superstrong Backbones Are the Stuff of Legend," 30 Apr. 2020 The oldest mammals go back much further in time, and contrary to the standard story of shrew-like critters kept in check by monstrous reptiles, mammals thrived during Mesozoic era. — Riley Black, Smithsonian, "Fossil Site Reveals How Mammals Thrived After the Death of the Dinosaurs," 25 Oct. 2019 But the disease does not appear to spread between horses; they are thought to acquire it from shrews, which can live in hay and secrete or excrete fluids containing the virus. — Tanya Lewis, Scientific American, "Virus Spread by Shrews Linked to Human Deaths from Mysterious Brain Infections," 8 Jan. 2020 That difference of 40 degrees is significant in the life of voles and shrews and insects and plants. — Anchorage Daily News, "Middle Alaska begins its transition to a quieter, snow-covered world," 12 Oct. 2019 Over 3 years, rats, shrews, and even frogs followed suit—more than 200,000 animals in all. — David Grimm, Science | AAAS, "Our favorite science news stories of the decade," 20 Dec. 2019 As the chart shows, the biggest male-bias seen in the six largest orders of mammals (rodents, bats, shrews and their kin, carnivores, primates and artiodactyls) is in the artiodactyls. — The Economist, "Museums’ animal collections favour males," 26 Oct. 2019 Though married to a terrible shrew, a man tries to figure out a way to be with his childhood sweetheart, who has just moved back into town. — Los Angeles Times, "Movies on TV this week Sept. 15, 2019: ‘Alien,’ ‘Aliens’ and more," 13 Sep. 2019 Point is: why do these men get to express anger and agitation for such trivial principles but the woman who built an entire campaign around fighting corruption gets to so easily be depicted as a shrew? — Michael Arceneaux, Essence, "Only Sexist Men Take Issue With Elizabeth Warren’s Justified Anger," 14 Nov. 2019

These example sentences are selected automatically from various online news sources to reflect current usage of the word 'shrew.' Views expressed in the examples do not represent the opinion of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.

Learn More about shrew

Dictionary Entries near shrew

Statistics for shrew

Last Updated

7 May 2020

Cite this Entry

“Shrew.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/shrew. Accessed 29 May. 2020.

Which is a synonym of exiguous?

Can you spell these 10 commonly misspelled words?

TAKE THE QUIZ

Test Your Knowledge - and learn some interesting things along the way.

TAKE THE QUIZ

shrew