Share: ploughshare vs. stockholder

In everyday English, a share is a portion of something owned collectively: you own shares in a company, you divide a meal into shares. The word comes from the idea of dividing or apportioning, and it has meant a stake or portion since medieval times.

On the farm, a share is something quite different: it is the cutting blade of a plough, cultivator, disc harrow, or seed drill. The share is the actual working edge that penetrates and fractures the soil. It is bolted or riveted to the sharebeam, the structural arm that holds it in place and angles it to the frame. The share wears quickly in stony or clayey ground and must be sharpened or replaced. Shares are made from cast iron or hardened steel and are often reversible, so a worn blade can be flipped to expose a fresh cutting edge before replacement becomes necessary.

The agricultural sense does not come from the ownership sense. Instead, both words share a common ancestor in Old English scearu, meaning a cutting or a division, which gave rise to the verb 'to shear'. A share cuts through soil the way shears cut through cloth; the metaphor is one of division and separation. By the time English ploughing vocabulary was recorded in writing, 'share' had already narrowed to mean the blade itself, while the broader sense of apportionment and ownership developed along a different path in commercial language.

The confusion between these two meanings is largely modern. Until the late nineteenth century, agricultural shares were not traded as financial instruments, and financial shares were not called 'shares' in the way we use the term today. The two senses have lived in separate worlds: one in the field, one in the counting house.