Shippon

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A building on a farm where cows are kept, especially in the northern and western parts of England
2. A shelter or barn in which cattle are housed and milked, typically attached to a farmhouse
3. A simple farm building used to keep cows during the winter months and at milking time

Etymology: A shippon is a cowshed, and the word has been used in English for centuries in the dialects of northern England and Scotland, though it is far older than that. It descends from Old English "sċypen", a shelter or shed, which in turn goes back to a Proto-Germanic root "*skup-" that also gave English the word shop. The connection is a surprise: a shop and a cowshed share a root meaning a lean-to or simple covered structure, and the earliest shops were open-fronted stalls built against a wall or under a roof, not rooms for selling. The word passed into Middle English as "shipne", "shepne" and similar spellings, which show how unsettled its pronunciation was before the forms settled. German has a close cousin in "Schuppen", meaning shed, and southern German dialects keep forms such as "Schupfn" and "Schupfa". Across the Germanic languages, then, the same root has produced barns, sheds and stalls rather than any single fixed building type.

Synonyms: byre, cowshed, cowhouse