How to Use shear off in a Sentence

shear off

verb
  • The top of his head had been sheared off.
    — Rania Abouzeid, New Yorker, 21 May 2026
  • The cab of the truck was sheared off and dragged about a quarter mile along the track.
    — Kris Habermehl, CBS News, 4 Feb. 2026
  • The crash sheared off the nose of the Air Canada jet.
    — Thomas Tracy, New York Daily News, 25 Mar. 2026
  • The collision appears to have sheared off the plane’s nose cone.
    — Jackie Flynn Mogensen, Scientific American, 23 Mar. 2026
  • At the gas station across the way, pumps were tipped over, and the roof was completely sheared off.
    — Lauren Victory, CBS News, 12 Mar. 2026
  • The plane’s nose was sheared off from the impact, leaving the pilot and co-pilot dead.
    — Evan Simko-Bednarski, New York Daily News, 23 Mar. 2026
  • Instead, the plane hit a light stanchion, sheared off the tops of some trees and burst into flames well short of the runway.
    — Scott Fowler, Charlotte Observer, 31 Jan. 2026
  • Some shots hit with enough force to snap off padding, crack components, or shear off the arm entirely.
    — Kaif Shaikh, Interesting Engineering, 3 Dec. 2025
  • Extra pressure on top of that snowpack from weight, wind, rain, heavy snow or motion can cause some of the layers to shear off and slide downhill.
    — ABC News, 18 Feb. 2026
  • The gas meters from the homes were also sheared off in the crash, which caused a natural gas leak, according to Looney.
    — Tom Ignudo, CBS News, 16 Apr. 2026
  • Scars on the trunks of floodplain trees where other wood in the swiftly flowing water smacked into the tree trunk with enough force to damage the bark or even shear off the living tree.
    — Ellen Wohl august 20, Literary Hub, 20 Aug. 2025
  • In 2021, when the Titan was being hoisted onto the deck of a ship, these bolts all sheared off, and the huge dome crashed down onto the sub's ocean launch platform.
    — Scharon Harding, ArsTechnica, 5 Aug. 2025
  • The Santa Cruz Wharf has been undergoing construction ever since a Christmas Eve storm two years ago sheared off a section of it.
    — John Ramos, CBS News, 23 Feb. 2026
  • On Monday evening, a EF-2 tornado from the west swept through four blocks of the Franklin County seat, effectively destroying TruComp’s 76,000-square-foot building, shearing off its front and blasting its east side into mounds of bricks, insulation and twisted metal.
    — Eric Adler, Kansas City Star, 14 Apr. 2026
  • On Monday evening, a EF-2 tornado from the west swept through four blocks of the Franklin County seat, effectively destroying TruComp’s 76,000-square-foot building, shearing off its front and blasting its east side into mounds of bricks, insulation and twisted metal.
    — Eric Adler, Kansas City Star, 16 Apr. 2026
  • During a 2021 Titanic dive, Titan’s four securing bolts sheared off while being hoisted aboard the Horizon Arctic, causing the forward dome to detach and fall onto the Launch and Recovery System platform in a catastrophic mechanical failure that narrowly avoided injuring the crew.
    — Michael Dorgan, FOXNews.com, 5 Aug. 2025

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'shear off.' 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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