How to Use shaft in a Sentence

shaft

1 of 2 noun
  • The left thumb should point downward along the grip and shaft.
    — Bestreviews, Chicago Tribune, 13 Mar. 2026
  • Once the ends of your hair shaft have split, there’s no way to rejoin the hair.
    — Danielle Sinay, Glamour, 23 Mar. 2026
  • Each model is white with a black shaft and a black alignment aid.
    — Langston Wertz Jr, Charlotte Observer, 9 June 2026
  • The caseband is ribbed like a pillar shaft, as is the crown.
    — Rachel Cormack, Robb Report, 13 Jan. 2026
  • He even gets bathed in a shaft of heavenly light at one point.
    — David Rooney, HollywoodReporter, 3 Sep. 2019
  • Some fill up jugs of water from an old mine shaft on the side of a mountain.
    — Cecilia Vega, CBS News, 23 Feb. 2026
  • The mine shaft is still there and, thankfully, so is the down-home food.
    — Chelsea Brasted, Southern Living, 12 Mar. 2026
  • And for the long-legged ladies, a 16-inch shaft will hit you at just the right spot.
    — Olivia Dubyak, InStyle, 8 Feb. 2026
  • The ankle height shaft on this pair is classic, but the spill seam adds a unique touch.
    — Annie Blackman, InStyle, 17 Jan. 2026
  • The tall version also solves the issue of a low shaft height.
    — Meg Carney, Field & Stream, 4 Jan. 2024
  • The robot-makers are a shaft of light at the bottom of the well.
    — Kat McGowan, WIRED, 4 Jan. 2024
  • The boots are a knee-high style, with a skintight shaft that clings comfortably around the legs.
    — Karla Rodriguez, Footwear News, 25 Nov. 2025
  • In the past, some radioactive fallout has leaked from test shafts.
    — Geoff Brumfiel, NPR, 30 Oct. 2025
  • But on steep, slippery terrain, a higher boot shaft is key.
    — Anna Fiorentino, Travel + Leisure, 11 Dec. 2025
  • The pull-on style features a knee-high design with a 16-inch shaft.
    — Karla Rodriguez, Footwear News, 3 Sep. 2019
  • With a 7-inch shaft, these boots are tall enough to keep you warm, but not too bulky for your commute.
    — Grace Wu, Good Housekeeping, 14 Nov. 2022
  • The mid-calf pair came in a deep chocolate suede with a slim shaft and softly tapered toe.
    — Maggie Clancy, Footwear News, 31 Dec. 2025
  • Off one tunnel shaft was a cage made with metal bars and a door that locked from the outside.
    — NBC News, 8 Feb. 2024
  • At the end of its heavy, foot-long wooden shaft was a steel head that ran seven inches.
    — Josh Ireland, Harpers Magazine, 24 Feb. 2026
  • Then flip the file 90-degrees and smooth out any rough areas on the nail shaft.
    — Bradley Ford, Popular Mechanics, 12 Jan. 2023
  • In the open shaft, the love and resentment in our lives felt like a soap opera staged in public.
    — Gigi Leung, Time, 20 Dec. 2025
  • The plungers are powered by an output shaft on the engine or from a motor.
    — Roy Berendsohn, Popular Mechanics, 21 Feb. 2023
  • This classic style has an 8-inch shaft with a 14-inch opening.
    — Nicola Fumo, Peoplemag, 31 Dec. 2023
  • The crew members in the elevator shaft were not named.
    — Nathan Diller, USA Today, 18 Feb. 2026
  • Now's a great time to grab yourself a pair of winter essentials like the tall leather shaft boots.
    — Maura Jenkins, Glamour, 27 Nov. 2023
  • In both locations, the aim was to blow off a concrete cap with one bomb and drop five more down the main shaft.
    — Samuel Granados, New York Times, 20 Aug. 2025
  • The soft shaft landed right at her knee, while the inside zipper reached right above her ankle.
    — Karla Rodriguez, Footwear News, 3 Sep. 2019
  • The 8-inch blending shaft is another plus.
    — Olivia Tarantino, Bon Appetit Magazine, 20 Sep. 2025
  • The miners insist the two shafts were not connected.
    — Tommy Trenchard, NPR, 23 Aug. 2025
  • The cleaning kit includes a bristle brush and a scraper that helps clean the blades, discs, and shaft.
    — Michelle Love, Better Homes & Gardens, 14 Sep. 2023

shaft

2 of 2 verb
  • You really got shafted in that deal.
  • Every team has one or two players who have been shafted by the system.
    — Paul Dehner Jr., Cincinnati.com, 25 Aug. 2017
  • How can the Bulldogs get to the second weekend, fans ask, if they are shafted in their seed line?
    — David Woods, Indianapolis Star, 10 Mar. 2018
  • It is powered by a 1,351cc twin-cylinder engine and has a three-speed gearbox and shaft final drive.
    — Josh Max, Forbes, 27 Oct. 2021
  • Parts of the mechanical systems are stashed in the base of the fins, and the passages from base to shaft to crown bristle with complexities.
    — Curbed, 10 Nov. 2022
  • Don’t use scissors or other similar tools with cutting, slicing, or chopping action anywhere near your sack or shaft either.
    — Sarah Fielding, Men's Health, 6 Dec. 2022
  • Both had careers cut short in the Seventies, after being shafted by their labels and the industry-at-large.
    — Brittany Spanos, Rolling Stone, 5 Aug. 2025
  • Gotta say Marcus Rutherford is really getting shafted this season.
    — Alex Raiman, EW.com, 29 Sep. 2023
  • Do your research, ask questions and go over every detail personally to avoid being shafted or misinformed.
    — Eugenia Last, The Mercury News, 18 Sep. 2019
  • Only a socialist could do that to his brother, only a socialist could regard familial ties as being so trivial as to shaft his own brother.
    — Julia Webster, Time, 5 Sep. 2019
  • Any conceivable outcome would shift the tax burden, shafting commercial property owners and renters.
    — Sun Sentinel Editorial Board, Sun Sentinel, 3 Jan. 2026
  • Fittings attempt to match things like clubhead weight and shaft flexibility to an individual golfer’s swing.
    — Mike Freeman, San Diego Union-Tribune, 26 Nov. 2020
  • Part of the problem, experts say, is that health care fraud is often misunderstood as shafting greedy insurers — not the folks paying for health insurance.
    — Marshall Allen, ProPublica, 19 July 2019
  • That took a dramatic shift when Johnson shafted the Raiders for the Chicago Bears earlier in the week.
    — Vincent Frank, Forbes, 22 Jan. 2025
  • Feeling shafted over the attention the farmer was paying Mayfield, Wood would dramatically leave the show.
    — Hannah Kirby, Journal Sentinel, 18 May 2024
  • The government was forced to redraft certain settlements with owners after shafting them by not accounting for valuable nearby water rights.
    — James Warren, The Hive, 14 Dec. 2017
  • For the first time across any of the Navy’s four public shipyards, crews performed underwater inspections of carrier shafting systems.
    — Sujita Sinha, Interesting Engineering, 30 Apr. 2026
  • That means that the nearly unbeatable Femi could be shafted out of the King of the Ring finals, perhaps by Lesnar himself.
    — Blake Oestriecher, Forbes.com, 27 June 2026
  • Baltimore Pride weekend is always meant to be a celebration, but some members of the city's transgender community are instead feeling shafted.
    — Dennis Valera, CBS News, 18 June 2026
  • The unfounded hostility to that film basically killed its release and then shafted the chances of the movie and of Ryan Gosling’s contemplative performance in the awards races.
    — David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter, 1 Oct. 2019
  • For one, Wonder Woman was completely shafted, as was the sublimely hilarious Girls Trip.
    — Christopher Rosa, Glamour, 11 Dec. 2017
  • His team soon discovered that Komagataeibacter xylinus, the bacteria that made the cellulose, and Escherichia coli, the bacteria that made the colors, were shafting each other.
    — New Atlas, 2 Dec. 2025
  • But the nepotism, machine politics & corporate & lobbyist money in Sacramento is shafting working people.
    — Nicole Nixon, Sacbee.com, 17 Nov. 2025
  • As a bonus, the Suns got shafted by Charlotte in a trade for the 43rd consecutive time (pour one out for the Nick Richards era) and somehow still keeps making deals with the Hornets.
    — John Hollinger, New York Times, 29 June 2026
  • But some of the same forces that contributed to Trump’s victory here feed the skepticism over the tax bill — a sense that working people are getting shafted, a jaded view of Washington, and deep skepticism toward Congress.
    — Craig Gilbert, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 18 Dec. 2017
  • But things are about to kick off, as Yoshii/Ratel’s many aggrieved associates team up, becoming a kind of collective vent for and magnifier of the frustrations of all the buyers and sellers who’ve ever been shafted by an unscrupulous middleman.
    — Jessica Kiang, Variety, 31 Aug. 2024
  • Its longtime token black character, John Diggle, sees his character development continually shafted to make room for Oliver Queen’s brooding sessions.
    — Clarkisha Kent, The Root, 11 Sep. 2017
  • The deep-cleansing shampoo also features peptides, including the Acetyl Tetrapeptide-3, to give tissue regeneration around the hair shaft a boost and also block the production of DHT, aka the hormone that can shrink follicles.
    — Jessie Quinn, StyleCaster, 4 Aug. 2025
  • Between February and June, Mamdani rallied momentum and broke through the noise with his innovative ideas, further benefiting from a grassroots effort by the left to shaft Cuomo from every progressive's ranked-choice primary ballot.
    — Kyler Alvord, PEOPLE, 5 Nov. 2025
  • With Asuka and Sky getting shafted at WrestleMania and then losing Sane to her future endeavors, the two beloved stars got a chance at redemption at WWE Backlash 2026.
    — Blake Oestriecher, Forbes.com, 9 May 2026

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'shaft.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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