shallow

adj

1. Having little depth; significantly less deep than wide.

   “This crater is relatively shallow.”

   “Sauté the onions in a shallow pan.”

   “The corpus is massive, being deeper anteriorly and shallowest where the ramus takes origin. The corpi of both sides are more closely spaced to each other than in the living form, and the symphysis is narrower.”

   “The two shallower fibriscesses may represent lysis due to the spread of the infection that entered the phalanx at its presumed puncture wound, the deep fibriscess on the palmar surface.”

2. Extending not far downward.

   “The water is shallow here.”

3. Concerned mainly with superficial matters.

   “It was a glamorous but shallow lifestyle.”

4. Lacking interest or substance; flat; one-dimensional.

   “The acting is good, but the characters are shallow.”

5. Not intellectually deep; not penetrating deeply; simple; not wise or knowing.

   “shallow learning”

   “The king was neither so shallow, nor so ill advertised, as not to perceive the intention of the French king.”

6. (obsolete)Not deep in tone.

   “the sound perfecter and not so shallow and jarring”

7. Not far forward, close to the net.

   “Rosol spurned the chance to finish off a shallow second serve by spooning into the net, and a wild forehand took the set to 5-4, with the native of Prerov required to hold his serve for victory.”

8. Not steep; close to horizontal.

   “a shallow climb”

   “a shallow descent”

   “a shallow bank angle”

   “The planes then flew side by side with motors wide open in a very shallow climb[…].”

   “If they [the Apollo astronauts] come in too steeply, they will be crushed in the Earth’s atmosphere. If they come in too shallow, they will skip out and go into Earth orbit and not be able to return.”

noun

1. A shallow portion of an otherwise deep body of water.

   “The ship ran aground in an unexpected shallow.”

   “A swift stream is not heard in the channel, but […]upon shallows of gravel.”

   “dashed on the shallows of the moving sand”

   “It happened that, as I was watching some of the little people bathing in a shallow, one of them was seized with cramp and began drifting downstream.”

   “He dipped his hand in the shallow: Water ran over and under Hair on a narrow wrist bone; […]”

2. A fish, the rudd.
3. (historical)A costermonger's barrow.

   “You might have gone there quite as easily, and enjoyed yourself much more, had your mode of conveyance been the railway, or a hansom, or even a costermonger's shallow.”

verb

1. (ambitransitive)To make or become less deep.

   “The shallowing of Cenozoic age-frequency curves from tropics to poles thus appears to reflect the decreasing probability for genera to reach and remain established in progressively higher latitudes ( 9 ).”