I occasionally see or hear this phrase.
Problem:
The word “shuddered” is incorrect here.
Explanation:
I see or hear the phrase as part of a full sentence such as “The shuddered windows protected the glass from the hurricane.”
The intransitive verb “shudder” — with two “d”s and from which the word “shuddered” is derived — means to tremble or shake convulsively, as from cold, fear, or horror.
So the past participle “shuddered” cannot be used as an adjective to modify “windows” for two reasons:
- The verb “shudder” is intransitive and therefore its past participle cannot be used as an adjective.
- Even if “shuddered” could be used as an adjective, it would make no sense to use it to modify the noun “windows”.
The solution comes from realizing that Americans often mispronounce “t”s (as in “tango”) as “d”s (as in “David”).
So the word “shudder” — with two “d”s — is a typical mispronunciation, at least by Americans, of the word “shutter” — with two “t”s.
And given that the transitive verb “shutter” means to close with shutters, we have the solution.
For fun, I searched Google for each of the following (with the quotation marks, to avoid variations) and got about the indicated numbers of matches:
- “shuttered windows” — with two middle “t”s as in “tango” — 98,800 matches
- “shuddered windows” — with two middle “d”s as in “David” — 97,400 matches
This tells me that Web authors have used the meaningful “shuttered windows” versus the meaningless “shuddered windows” by a ratio of 1.01-to-1, which is absolutely dreadful.
Solution:
“shuttered windows”