What is a shared static library?

Question

Whilst looking into the programming language Red, I encountered the following term in it's roadmap:

Shared static library (.a)

This seems like an oxymoron to me; I was under the impression that shared libraries were loaded at runtime (with a smaller static library for it's exported symbols linked at compile time), and static libraries were linked at compile time?

My question is

What is a shared static library?

Additional Information

The context this was in was under File Format Emitters, sub category Mach-o at this link was the first place I noticed it, but after closer inspection it's mentioned all over the place.

Answer 1

(Red lead author here) I would say a bad choice of words, probably caused by yet another quick copy/paste of HTML snippets, and poor re-reading. :-)

Thanks for noticing.