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:''For similarly pronounced words, see sheer, Shere, or sher.''
'Shear' as a noun may refer to:

★ Bias (textile), in clothing design, fabric may be cut on the shear

★ Cosmic shear, an effect of distortion of image of distant galaxies due to deflection of light by matter, as predicted by general relativity (see also weak lensing and gravitational lens)

★ Shear (geology), a form of fault in rocks

★ Guillotine (metalwork), also called a shear, a machine used to cut sheet metal

★ Simple shear, a special case of deformation of a fluid

★ Shear (fluid), in fluid dynamics, refers to the shear stresses and responses thereto in fluids

★ Shear (mathematics), a particular kind of linear mapping, also called transvections

★ Shear rate, a gradient of velocity in a flowing material

★ Shear stress in physics, refers to a stress state that will cause 'shearing' (see verb) when it exceeds a material's shear strength

★ Shear strength (soil), the shear strength of soil under loading

★ Shear line (locksmithing), where the inner cylinder ends and the outer cylinder begins in a cylinder lock

★ Shear line (meteorology), an area of wind shear

★ Wind shear, a difference in wind speed or direction between two wind currents in the atmosphere

★ Shear wall, in structural engineering
'Shear' as a verb or 'shearing' may refer to

★ Sheep shearing, the process of removing the wool from a sheep

★ Shearing interferometer, in optics, a simple and very common means to check the collimation of beams by observing interference

★ Shearing (physics), the deformation of a material substance in which parallel internal surfaces slide past one another

★ Skin, specifically, the tearing and splitting of the layers