shelve

Shelve is a flat horizontal surface used for storage, typically part of furniture or a wall-mounted system. Shelves can be fixed, adjustable, or floating, and are made from wood, metal, or composite materials. They are used in homes, offices, libraries, and retail spaces to organize books, dishes, tools, and other items.

As a verb, shelve means to place an item on a shelf or to store it away. It also means to postpone, defer, or discard consideration of an idea or project, as in the phrase “the proposal was shelved.” The expression “on the shelf” can describe goods that are stored for later use or sale, and a project can be shelved if it is set aside indefinitely.

Shelves come in various forms, including built-in wall shelves, freestanding bookcases, adjustable metal shelving, and floating shelves that attach to a wall without visible supports. The choice of material, size, and weight capacity depends on intended use, space constraints, and aesthetic considerations.

In computing, shelve is the name of a module in the Python standard library that provides a simple persistent dictionary. It stores key-value pairs in a file, with string keys and values that are pickled objects, using a dbm database as the backend. Example: import shelve; with shelve.open('data') as d: d['x'] = 1; print(d['x']).

Etymology-wise, the verb form is derived from the noun shelf, with the -ve suffix forming the verb; the noun itself is older in origin.