sheaf

From Middle English scheef, from Old English sċēaf, from Proto-Germanic *skauba- (“sheaf”). Akin to West Frisian t-sheaf, Dutch schoof (“a bundle of stalks and ears of wheat, rye or other grain; a bundle”), German Schaub, Old Norse skauf (“a fox's tail”). Compare Gothic 𐍃𐌺𐌿𐍆𐍄 (skuft, “hair of the head”), German Schopf (“tuft”), Albanian çup (“without tail, maimed”).

• enPR: shēf, IPA^(key): /ʃiːf/

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• Rhymes: -iːf

sheaf (plural sheaves or sheafs)

1. A quantity of the stalks and ears of wheat, rye, or other grain, bound together; a bundle of grain or straw.
   • 1593, William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, Act V, Scene III, line 70:

     O, let me teach you how to knit again / This scattered corn into one mutual sheaf, / These broken limbs again into one body.

   • c. 1697, John Dryden, “Georgic I”, in The Works of Virgil:

     E’en while the reaper fills his greedy hands, / And binds the golden sheaves in brittle bands

2. Any collection of things bound together; a bundle.
   • 1986, John le Carré, A Perfect Spy:

     Together the two men march up the aisle and mount the dais, and while Muspole shakes hands with the chairman and his lady, the major draws a sheaf of notes from a briefcase and lays them on the table.

   a sheaf of paper

3. A bundle of arrows sufficient to fill a quiver, or the allowance of each archer.
   • 1700, John Dryden, Palamon and Arcite:

     The sheaf of arrows shook, and rattled in the case.

4. A quantity of arrows, usually twenty-four.
   • 1786, Francis Grose, A Treatise on Ancient Armour and Weapons, page 34:

     Arrows were anciently made of reeds, afterwards of cornel wood, and occasionally of every species of wood: but according to Roger Ascham, ash was best; arrows were reckoned by sheaves, a sheaf consisted of twenty-four arrows.

5. (mechanical) A sheave.
6. (mathematics) An abstract construct in topology that associates data to the open sets of a topological space, together with well-defined restrictions from larger to smaller open sets, subject to the condition that compatible data on overlapping open sets corresponds, via the restrictions, to a unique datum on the union of the open sets.
   • Sometimes, it can be useful to use an alternative approach to endow a manifold with a C^k-structure. Here k = 1, 2, ..., ∞, or ω for real analytic manifolds. Instead of considering coordinate charts, it is possible to start with functions defined on the manifold itself. The structure sheaf of M, denoted C^k, is a sort of functor that defines, for each open set U ⊂ M, an algebra C^k(U) of continuous functions U → R.   —Wikipedia

• (bundle of grain): reap

• indsheaf

sheaf (third-person singular simple present sheafs, present participle sheafing, simple past and past participle sheafed)

1. (transitive) To gather and bind into a sheaf; to make into sheaves

   to sheaf wheat

2. (intransitive) To collect and bind cut grain, or the like; to make sheaves.
   • 1599, William Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act III, Scene II, line 107:

     They that reap must sheaf and bind; Then to cart with Rosalind.

• SHAEF, Shefa