For most of its existence the word shave did not refer to hair removal.

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Men have been scraping the hair off their faces (or not) time out of mind and our word shave is old too.

It first appears in Old English in 725 and the experts trace its little cutting trail back through Germanic languages to a Teutonic word scab.  Our word scab goes back to Latin and Greek roots which in Latin relates to meanings of “scratch” and “itch,” while in Greek it may relate to words meaning “dig” and “spade.”

Merriam-Webster thinks shave relates to these scabby Latin and Greek roots but The Oxford English Dictionary says it’s doubtful.

Right from the beginning of its use in English the word shave meant to scrape away, but it wasn’t until 600 years after it came into English that it was used in reference to hair removal.

A shaver can be the thing you use to shave with but the word has also been used to refer to a youngster, presumably someone who has just gotten old enough to shave.

Around the time of Henry VIII the term shaveling appeared as a derogatory term. In this case though it wasn’t the young and inexperienced that were being insulted, the low social standing of shavelings had much more to do with King Henry’s desire for new wives and his break with the Catholic Church.

When Henry got turned off of the Catholic Church so did his subjects.

But all the while there were these monks milling around in their monasteries and old cathedrals. Since their brand of religion was out of favor so were they. These were the guys who were being called shavelings and the reason for that was that their church required them to shave the tops of their heads; a style called a tonsure.

Before the word shave meant to remove one’s beard or underarm hair it was being applied to things such as the removal of a thin layer of wood. We still shave off wood with a wood-plane and some authorities think that the word shaft might have evolved because this is how people would have produced wooden shafts, by shaving away the material they didn’t need.