Shit is an English-language profanity. As a noun, it refers to fecal matter, and as a verb it means to defecate; in the plural ("the shits"), it means diarrhea. Shite is a common variant in British and Irish English. As a slang term, shit has many meanings, including: nonsense, foolishness, something of little value or quality, trivial and usually boastful or inaccurate talk or a contemptible person. It could also be used to refer to any other noun in general or as an expression of annoyance, surprise or anger. Etymology The word is likely derived from Old English, having the nouns scite (dung, attested only in place names) and scitte (diarrhoea) and the verb scītan (to defecate, attested only in bescītan, to cover with excrement); eventually it morphed into Middle English schītte (excrement), schyt (diarrhoea) and shiten (to defecate), and it is virtually certain that it was used in some form by preliterate Germanic tribes at the time of the Roman Empire. The word may be further traced to Proto-Germanic *skit-, and ultimately to Proto-Indo-European *skheid- "cut, separate", the same root believed to have become the word shed. The word has several cognates in modern Germanic languages, such as German Scheiße, Dutch schijt, Swedish skit, Icelandic skítur, Norwegian skitt etc. Ancient Greek had 'skōr' (gen. 'skatos' hence 'scato-'), from Proto-Indo-European *sker-, which is likely unrelated. Usage The word shit (also shite in British and Hiberno-English) is considered profanity and is usually avoided in formal speech. Minced oath substitutes for the word shit in English include shoot, shucks, sugar, and the euphemistic backronym, Sugar, Honey, Ice(d) Tea. In the word's literal sense, it has a rather small range of common usages. An unspecified or collective occurrence of feces is generally shit or some shit; a single deposit of feces is sometimes a shit or a piece of shit; and to defecate is to shit or to take a shit. While it is common to speak of shit as existing in a pile, a load, a hunk, and other quantities and configurations, such expressions flourish most strongly in the figurative. When uttered as an exclamation or interjection, shit may convey astonishment or a feeling of being favorably impressed or disgusted. Similar utterances might be damn!, wow! or yuck!. Piece of shit may also be used figuratively to describe a particularly loathsome individual, or an object that is of poor quality ("this car