www.alphadictionary.com

I enjoy playing Words with Friends, an online Scrabble-like game. The last couple of days we have built the word "shelved" between two triple word blanks. To cover the first of the blanks, both of us have tried prefixing un- and re-, which the game rejects. Probably any face to face opponent in Scrabble would accept it without a second thought. Equally probably, those who pay WWF would accept a word reject as merely part of the quirky dictionary WWF uses. What needled me into this post, however, was when I wrote my opponent a note about it, spell check flagged it. So I came to AD and entered both words. For one I got only one dictionary that had it, and for the other there were seven, but it didn't pop up in the major dictionaries. Haven't all of us browsing in ghe library unshelved and reshelved books, probably several times a visit. So why do you think the word is not routinely carried by all dictionaries? And spellchecks?

I can't say as I myself have ever used either word. However, I do know that some stores charge a re-shelving fee if you return an item.

My guess is that reshelve and reshelf are either not commonly used or are so totally intuitive that some dictionaries just leave them out. My spell checker allows reshelf. I prefer reshelve. Grammarphobia, Englishforums, and others say reshelve is okay. Merriam-Webster grudgingly admits it may be a word (putting it only in their unabridged edition).

If I were playing Scrabble I wouldn't challenge it, although it is not in my Scrabble Players Dictionary.

I never heard or used unshelve or unshelf. But I would allow either.

Among my many college jobs, I was a stacker in the library. In libraries, stacks mean shelves. In my short stint as a food market employee, I was a stocker.

You sould extend "shelved" with
misshelved
If you could get rid of the "d" you could exend "shelve" on both sides with "misshelvers"
and on the front side there are
bookshelves
and
mantelshelves
and without the "e" there is "misshelving"

Minor detail: I didn't have those letters. Don't know whether it would have accepted them.

bnjtokyo: and so on ad infinitum.