Etymology First attested 1915. From chive, chieve, chife, chiv (“knife”), from Romani chive, chiv, chivvomengro (“knife, dagger, blade”).
1
Slang A knife, especially a makeshift one fashioned from something not normally used as a weapon (like a plastic spoon or a toothbrush).
It's perhaps fitting that I write this introduction in jail—that graduate school of survival. Here you learn how to use toothpaste as glue, fashion a shiv out of a spoon and build intricate communication networks.1971, Abbie Hoffman, “Introduction”, in Steal This Book, Pirate Editions / Grove Press:
Mr. Simpson finished “If I Did It” with the help of a ghostwriter, but after a public outcry, the book was shelved, and the woman who had agreed to publish it lost her job. “Basically, I got the shiv,” Ms. Regan said in a phone interview this week.2024 April 13, Jacob Bernstein, quoting Judith Regan, “When O.J. Simpson ‘Confessed’ to Murder”, in The New York Times:
2
A particular woody by-product of processing flax or hemp.
Anyway, that's how Jimmie came to be shivved and left to bleed out in the shower.2016, Andrew Shaffer, The Day of the Donald, Crooked Lane Books, →ISBN, page 6:
2
Broadly, Slang To stab (someone) with anything not normally used as a stabbing weapon.