Shined is not a word

Levels of Distractibility: Who cares? = *. Some people will be distracted from your meaning: = **. Many people will be distracted from your meaning: = ***.

Question: Is there a difference between «shined» and «shone»?

Answer: «Shine,» «shined,» «shone»: Use «shined» with a direct object: «He shined the flashlight on the house.» «Flashlight» is the direct object of «shined.» Shined what? «Flashlight.»

Without the direct object, use «shone»: «The sun shone only once this week.» Thanks to the NYT Manual of Style and Usage.

Rating of distractibility: (***). I didn’t know the distinction! But the «sun shined» would not sound right. Nor would, «He shone the flashlight.» On the basis of sound alone, I think many people would be distracted. I learned something writing this blog. RayS.

Asked by: Miss Caleigh Oberbrunner

Score: 4.8/5
(38 votes)

At the entry for “shine,” Merriam-Webster’s says the simple past tense can be “shone” or “shined.” Both are fine.

Is it the sun shined or the sun shone?

The verb shine has two past-tense forms: shined and shone. Shined and shone are competing acceptable past tense forms of the verb shine. Some (but not all) sources recommend using shined when the verb has an object and shone when it does not: Grammar Girl shined her headlights at the abandoned house.

Is it shined a light or shone a light?

shine. When this verb is intransitive, it means “to give or make light”; the past tense is shone {the stars shone dimly}. When it is transitive, it means “to cause to shine”; the past tense is shined {the caterer shined the silver}.

How do you use the word shone?

Shone sentence example

What is the plural of shine?

Noun. shine (countable and uncountable, plural shines)

23 related questions found

Incorrect conjugation of verbs is a pet peeve of many grammatically sensitive English speakers. It can often seem lazy to the point of willful ignorance.

The fact of the matter is that many verbs in English are conjugated in ways that are counter intuitive. These verbs make it difficult for a person who is learning English to master the language. When even native English speakers use past tense incorrectly, the picture gets even murkier for language learners.

To complicate matters even further, some verbs change depending on whether they have a direct or indirect object, or no object at all. Shine is an excellent example. It is conjugated sometimes as shined and sometimes as shone.

Read on to find out whether you should be using shined or shone in a given context.

What is the Difference Between Shined and Shone?

In this article, I will compare shined vs. shone. I will use each conjugation in a sentence example to illustrate their proper usage. Plus, at the end, I will show you a useful trick to help you decide whether shone or shined is correct for your writing.

When to Use Shined

What does shined mean? Shined is the past tense of to shine, which means to emanate light or to excel. Shined can also mean polished.

Shined is a transitive verb, which means the action is being done to something or someone else. In other words, a transitive verb is one that has an object.

See the following sentences for examples.

• The car detailer shined the paint.
• Andy shined the shoes of all the other employees at the city hall.
• In front of them, police officers and detectives shined flashlights on the street and sidewalk in front of the two-story orange brick home. –Chicago Tribune

When to Use Shone

What does shone mean? Shone, unlike shined, is an intransitive verb. Intransitive verbs have no object, which means that the action is being done by someone or something, but not to anything or anyone else.

Shone carries the same meanings as shined and is also in the past tense. Here are some examples of shone in a sentence,

• The moon shone brightly that night.
• When she finally earned a full time job, Esmerelda shone, delivering more pizzas per hour than any other employee.
• The tonal-atonal split in classical music, embedded in Cold War cultural politics, no longer seemed urgent, and the values that shone from such mid-century scores as “Appalachian Spring,” the Clarinet Concerto, and “Fanfare for the Common Man”—clarity, optimism, and impregnable craftsmanship—were hugely attractive. –The New Yorker

Phrases with Shined and Shone

The conjugation shone is sometimes paired with the prepositions on, forth, from, etc., to form the following phrases,

• Shone on
• Shone forth
• Shone from

The conjugation shined is not used in similar contexts.

Trick to Remember the Difference

Here is a helpful trick to remember shone vs. shined.

Shined and shone are both past tense forms of the verb shine.

Shined is used with an object, and is thus a transitive verb. Shone is used with no object present, making it an intransitive verb.

Shone contains the letters N and O. You can use the letters N and O to form the initials of the phrase “no object,” which is the condition under which you would choose to use shone. This mnemonic should help you remember the situations in which to use shone, and by extension, when shined should be used instead.

Summary

Is it shined or shone? Shined and shone are forms of the verb shine, which is defined as to emanate light, to excel at something, or to polish something.

Shined is a transitive verb, while shone is an intransitive verb.

You can remember to use shone with no object, since shone contains the letters O and N, which can be rearranged to form the initials of the phrase “no object.”

The distinction between shined and shone is one of the more advanced grammatical questions a language learner is likely to face. Navigating this choice correctly shows skill and determination, and is well worth the effort.

To summarize,

• Shined is a transitive verb; shined will take an object,
• Shone is an intransitive verb; shone will not take an object.

It seems as though every time I’m directed to the Huffington Post, it’s to see an article that someone was complaining about. My most recent trip was no different, as I was directed to an article about “Words Almost Everyone Mixes Up Or Mangles” thanks to Daughter Number Three. It offers as either a mix-up or mangling (I’m not entirely clear which) shined and shone, which battle for the position as past tense and participle for the verb shine:

“Shine is one of those ‘strong verbs’ that had an irregular past tense and past participle (shone) but later acquired a regular form ending in –ed as well. Some people use the forms interchangeably, but there is a pattern that most people follow to keep them distinct. Shined takes a personal subject and an object: I shined the flashlight at the bear. Shone is used of light sources and does not take an object: The moon shone over the harbor.”

But DNT didn’t think this fit with her usage, and I don’t think it fits with mine, either. Let’s break down the claims and see how they stand up. But first, let’s briefly talk about past tenses, because they’re going to be important later on, and I think the English tense system isn’t adequately taught in school. A verb in English has two basic past tense forms, the simple past and the past participle. Consider the verb speak. It has two past forms, spoke and spoken:

(1a) He spoke of New World Orders and death panels.
(1b) Afterward, I wished we had never spoken.

Spoke is the simple past form, which occurs without any auxiliary predecessors (e.g., had). Spoken is the past participle, which occurs with an auxiliary (had in (1b)). The past participle is also the form that is used in the passive, and for certain adjectival forms of the verb:

(2a) The words were *spoke/spoken in the style of Sy Greenbloom, owner of Spatula City.
(2b) Justin Bieber’s new *spoke/spoken word album is expected to sell tepidly.

For most English verbs, these two forms are the same (talked, slapped, etc.), but many common verbs have two different forms. These two-form verbs include eat, beat, bite, and do. And, possibly, shine. Okay, enough digression. Let’s examine the claims.

Shined is the newer form. More or less right, but neither one’s new. Shine is originally a Germanic word, and its past tense was formed using ablaut, a kind of morphological vowel mutation. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, in Old English the infinitive was scínan, with simple past forms scán and scinon. The past participle form is apparently unattested in Old English (if I’m correctly understanding what the OED is telling me).

In late Middle English and Early Modern English (1300-1700), according to the OED, shone (from OE scán) and shined split time as the simple past, and shined was the common form for the past participle. Shone, if it did indeed come from scán, is technically older, but shined was standard throughout the period in both usages:

(1a) “No man she saw & 3it shynede the mone” [simple past; Chaucer c1385]
(1b) “Then shined foorth indeede all loue among them.” [simple past; Sidney a1586]

(2a) “The mone is alway halfe shyned of the sonne.” [past participle; Trevisa 1398]
(2b) “It is god..which hath shyned in oure hertes, for to geve the light of knowledge off the glorious god.” [past participle; Tindale 1526]*

It’s not clear that shine originally had shone as its past participle; the OED notes that sinen appeared once as the past participle in Middle English, but that shone is only first attested as a past participle in 1566. It may well be that shined was the original past participle, but I lack sufficient knowledge of the history of English to state this as anything more than a hunch. The key point is that the relative ages of the forms are irrelevant; both have been around for centuries.

Shined takes a personal subject. Nope. I searched for shined in Mark Davies’s excellent and free Corpus of Historical American English (COHA)**, and found 166 instances. In 47 cases, the word preceding shined was shoes, but shoes were rarely the subject. The sentences were mostly things like “I just had those shoes shined!”, so let’s overlook them for now as irrelevant to the claim. The next most common predecessor, though, was light, which appeared 10 times, each time as a subject. Same with the five times sun shined appeared and the two times for eyes shined. There were another 14 inanimate subjects that only occurred once, bringing the total to 31. By comparison, there were only 18 occurrences of human subjects with shined.*** No evidence there for requiring a personal subject.

Shined takes an object. Not necessarily. Again, we’ll overlook the cases of shoes shining for now. But in each of the cases with inanimate subjects listed above, there was no object of the verb shine. The sentences were instead “The sun shined like his smile” and such. Since inanimate subjects were more common in this sample, lacking an object was more common than having an object, so there’s no evidence for this claim either.

Shone takes a light source as its subject and no object. On shone, the claim held up better. COHA returned 3753 instances of shone preceded by a noun, and of those, 906 are sun shone, 633 are eyes shone, 418 are light shone, and 312 are moon shone. These alone account for 60% of the results. In fact, the top 100 subjects all appear to be light sources (although some, like eyes, are only metaphorical). I failed to find a single instance in COHA of shone taking an object.

However, this preference for light-source subjects and no objects may only be the case in written or historical English. A quick Google search shows “she shone” and “she shined” are comparably common (64K to 84K hits), so while there may be a preference for inanimate subjects with shone, there’s clearly no prohibition against animate subjects.

So what’s the real difference? It’s not about light sources or who’s doing the shining. It’s about shoes. shone is hardly used in the context of shining shoes; “shined shoes” has 34K Google hits, while “shone shoes” has 1K. On COHA, shoes is the most common noun to appear next to shined, with 74 examples. shoes doesn’t appear in the top 500 nouns on either side of shone, meaning that there is at most one instance of shoes shone or shone shoes in COHA. This is where the shined/shone difference actually shows up. Don’t get so distracted by the light.

I’m betting that there is also a formality/tone difference. For me, as a relatively young speaker of American English, The light shone in the darkness sounds almost poetic compared to The light shined in the darkness. My belief in this tone difference is bolstered by the fact that shone is far more common in COHA than shined is, but only twice as common on Google. That’s hardly conclusive, of course.

Lastly, there might be a past tense versus past participle distinction. I think that I prefer shined as a past participle but shone as a past tense. Other people might too. In fact, the OED lists shined as an American, dialectal, or archaic form for the past tense, but standard and current for the past participle, so I think (some) Brits might agree with me.

How could we settle this? Logistic regression over attested and labelled corpus examples would probably be the best way, allowing us to control for all the various variables proposed here and in the Huffington Post article. Then we’d know which ones are really significant preferences and which ones are idiosyncratic to either me or the author of the Huffington Post article. Until then, let’s fight it out in the comments!

—

*: This section as a whole has been substantially reworked thanks to points raised by Ryan, HR Freckenhorst, goofy, & The Ridger. Amongst other problems, both of the examples I’d given before were of shined as a simple past tense. goofy supplied the two past participle usages to complete the point I’d only partially made.

**: I’m using COHA here because of the claim that people are currently mixing up the words, so presumably we want to look back a bit to before this confusion hit. It also has higher quality texts than the average Internet hit, and some useful part-of-speech tagging.

***: These numbers come from a quick perusal of the data, so I ignored subjects that did not immediately precede shined, and probably miscounted a bit. Think of them as nothing more than vague estimates.

It’s time for the latest in our series of quick tips on usage and style shared by Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl. Here Mignon tackles the question of whether the past-tense form of shine should be shined or shone.

What’s the trouble? The verb 
shine has two past-tense forms:
shined and 
shone. 
Shined and 
shone are competing acceptable past tense forms of the verb 
shine. Some (but not all) sources recommend using 
shined when the verb has an object and 
shone when it does not:

• Grammar Girl shined her headlights at the abandoned house. (object)
• The light shone brightly. (no object)

The meaning matters too: shined is the only acceptable past tense when you mean «polished,» as in «He shined his shoes.»

What should you do? Stick with the traditional rule of using shined with an object and shone without an object unless you have a good reason to deviate.

Quick and dirty tip: The rhyme It’s shone when alone will help you remember to use shone when the verb is alone (i.e., has no object).

His shoes were shined to perfection.

Его ботинки были идеально начищены.

If parts allure thee, think how Bacon shined, / The wisest, brightest, meanest of mankind. (A. Pope, Essay on Man, 1734)

В науках жаждешь ты снискать успех? / Мудрейший Бэкон был презренней всех. (пер. В. Микушевича)

He shined up to all the pretty girls. *

Он увивался за всеми хорошенькими девушками.

His talent shines.

У него блестящий /явный/ талант.

The sun was shining.

Солнце ярко светило.

Would you like a shine?

Желаете чистку обуви?

The sun shone brightly.

Ярко светило солнце.

ещё 23 примера свернуть

Примеры, отмеченные *, могут содержать сленг и разговорные фразы.

The sun was shining through the clouds.  

The sun was shining through the windows.  

The sky was blue and the sun was shining.  

The blade shone brightly, a blur of silver.  

The stars were all out (=they were shining).  

Lucy’s dark hair seemed to have lost its shine.  

The moon was shining through a thin layer of cloud.  

Для того чтобы добавить вариант перевода, кликните по иконке ☰, напротив примера.