Shinties

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. Team games played with curved sticks and a small ball, traditionally in the Scottish Highlands, similar to hurling
2. Matches of a Gaelic stick-and-ball sport, played on a large grass pitch in Scotland with curved wooden sticks
3. Contests in which two teams strike a ball with curved clubs to score goals, a traditional sport of Highland Scotland

Etymology: Shinty is a Scottish team sport played with a stick called a caman and a small hard ball, and "shinties" is simply the plural of the noun, referring to more than one game of it. The sport is most closely associated with the Scottish Highlands, where it has been played for centuries, and its name is the form readers will meet in sports reports and club histories. The word's own origin is not documented, so the exact route by which "shinty" came to name the game cannot be traced with confidence. What is clear is that the plural follows ordinary English practice: a noun ending in a consonant-plus-"y" takes "-ies" when pluralised, just as "lorry" becomes "lorries". The plural therefore carries no separate history of its own beyond that of the singular.