shutter

One who shuts or closes something.

Noun

  1. One who shuts or closes something.
    • the openers and shutters of the sluices we believe are basic to the history of mind - 1980, Max Scheler, translated by Manfred S. Frings, Problems of a Sociology of Knowledge:
    • The volunteers consisted of a ringmaster, two experienced young cattlemen to grade the cattle, gate-openers and shutters[…] - 1958, Blackwood's Magazine:
  2. Each of a series of protective panels, usually wooden, placed over windows to block out the light.
  3. A similar screen used as an improvised stretcher to carry someone wounded or sick.
    • [T]he other fiddler had been carried home, exhausted, on a shutter. - 1843 December 19, Charles Dickens, “(please specify the page number)”, in A Christmas Carol. […], London: Chapman & Hall, […], →OCLC:
    • ‘I can remember his body coming home, on a shutter I suppose, just as I was going down to tea […].’ - 1915, Virginia Woolf, chapter XI, in The Voyage Out, London: Duckworth & Co., […], →OCLC:
  4. The part of a camera, normally closed, that opens for a controlled period of time to let light in when taking a picture.
  5. Any other opening and closing device.
    • A service hatch with sliding shutter is situated at the end of the kitchen next to the dining compartment. […] A shutter, in three parts, is fitted, which when lowered completely encloses the bar. - 1950 June, “New...
  6. A panel used to contain freshly poured concrete, which is usually removed when the concrete hardens.
    • The vertical wall was poured in two lifts, using two pairs of steel shutters which were bolted tightly onto 9-in. long wooden spacers. - 1959 December 5, Richard Hope, “Narrow Gauge Landslip”, in Railway Magazine, page...

    Synonyms: shuttering

Origin

From shut + -er. Compare shuttle.

Forms

shutters

Derived

ferroelectric shutter roller shutter shutterbug shutter chance shutter dam shutterer shutterless shutterlike shutter priority shutter-priority shutter shades shutter speed shutterspeed shutterwise time shutter unshutter

Verb

  1. To close shutters covering.
    • Shutter the windows: there's a storm coming!
  2. To close up (a building) for a prolonged period of inoccupancy.
    • It took all day to shutter the cabin now that the season has ended.
  3. To cancel or terminate.
    • The US is seeking to get Iran to shutter its nuclear weapons program.
    • This company was shuttered in 2002.
    • It has been a dithery decade for nuclear policy. After the 2011 disaster at the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan, several countries began shuttering their reactors and tearing up plans for new ones. - December 15 2022,...
  4. To rain heavily.
    • Mollie Wilson was a teenager living with her parents in Donaghmore in Tyrone, Northern Ireland [and said this]: 3rd September [1939] When Chamberlain made his declaration of war, there was violent thunder and lightning...
    • It's a bastard of a day, shuttering rain, but I can still shape up the hills off in the distance. - 2009 February 5, Ross Raisin, God's Own Country, Penguin UK, →ISBN:
    • ... looked at the rain shuttering down outside and thought about the Fosters. He had been a perfect gentleman , although rather old and pernickety and set in his ways, but[…] - 2014 July 1, Julian Symons, The Man Whose...

Forms

shutters shuttering shuttered