Shone? Short O.
From Ontario…
Joan had shown Shawn where the light shone.
Joan=shown, Shawn=shone
I always notice in the film Sense & Sensibility, when Kate Winslet’s Marianne reads the following lines from Cowper’s poem “The Castaway”:
“No voice divine the storm allayed,
No light propitious shone,
When, snatched from all effectual aid,
We perished, each alone.”
She pronounces “shone” with an extremely short “o”–it almost sounds like “shun.”
She does not, however, pronounce “alone” as “alun” to make it rhyme.
(I would pronounce more like “shown.”)
That would be a diphthong .
And whatever pronunciation you choose, everything sounds better than “shined”, which I have heard even from native speakers. * shudder *
Diphthong.
I don’t mean to pick on you Quartz, because you’re not the only one who has done this, but do you realise how uninformative this kind of an answer might be?
For example, to a Midwesterner like me, this exchange could be quite confusing:
Because to me, John, con, Sean, pawn, prawn, lawn, and brawn all rhyme.
I can’t even begin to imagine what pronunciation this one is trying to indicate, except that I’m sure it’s not what it looks like:
And this one leaves me entirely flummoxed:
W sound? None of these words has anything close to a w sound in it. Just to be clear, we’re talking about the sound that begins the word we, right? Where does that sound occur in any of these words?
American here. I’ve always pronounced it to rhyme with “bone” or “cone,” and somehow I’ve gotten to age 37 without ever noticing anyone ever pronouncing it any other way.
Some people with a Southern drawl prolong “w” sounds, or even add “w” sounds to words when they say them. It’s the only way I can explain the sound. Shone and shown sound pretty well exactly the same in some regions. That is what I was speaking of. Some regions of Kansas have “dialects” with a more Southern accent, and this area has a largish amount of people with downright Oklahoman drawls.
To me shone=shown, and therefore sounds like “ow” words, which don’t actually have a distinct “w” sound in them at all. Like own, it’s not oh-wah-n, but oh-n.
That is the difference in how I say things. I say words like shown with a (not heavy, but notable) “w” sound, and there is a contrast between that and shone. I don’t think I’m an anamoly, people around me in when I’m in Central Kansas say things a similar way if they were born in the region. (I reside in southeast Kansas atm.)
Coming in from a Generic Northern English perspective:
Rhyme: shone, con, Ron, John. Vowel on it’s own is short O, as in “hot”.
Rhyme: shown, bone, phone, clone, zone. Vowel is long O, as in “hoe”.
Rhyme: Sean, yawn, lawn, torn, horn, corn. Vowel is long A, as in “hall”.
None of the three groups rhyme with each other, and none really have a “w” in them - the third group is probably closest to having “aw” rather than “o” as the vowel, though.
Listen closely and contrast shown with (the first) shone on these pages to see what I mean. There really isn’t a “w” sound in the second word, it’s been blunted. It takes a bit of time to pick out, but it’s there.
Anybody else hearing “the life of the wife is ended by the knife” song from Family Guy?
Just me, huh?
My ear doesn’t detect any difference between the “shown” and the first “shone.” The fact that two pronunciations (which I can distinguish) are given for “shone” suggests to me that the alternatives are acceptable, depending on region. That’s what a good dictionary does, as far as I’m concerned. Neither is “correct” over the other, just differently pronounced. There are thousands of such instances.
I love the online dictionaries with the sounds! Much easier to understand than this short o nonsense. 
I can’t hear a difference between shown and shone, either. Maybe it is a regional thing. I say that because when I first moved away from TN, people asked me if my name was pronounced “Brinda” or “Brenda.” I honestly couldn’t hear a difference–both sounded like “Brinda” which is how Tennesseans pronounce “Brenda”. Then, about a year later, I could hear the difference. It just took that long for my ear to adapt.
Brynda, that is exactly the point I was making. We have “regional listening habits”, and we automatically process words in the accent we are used to hearing for the most part. When we do hear a difference, the contrast is that much more because it was a big enough difference to actually register. I can’t get Mr. Clawbane to pick out the difference in the two words either, but he’s used to hearing Oklahoma drawls, since he was born in this region. I know my little brother and parents would hear the subtle differences in the way those two words are said on the dictionary pages though.
I’ve listened very carefully several times and these sound exactly the same to me, and I’m not entirely unused to listening for differences in pronunciation. I don’t hear a “w” sound, blunted or otherwise. It’s my belief that the sound samples in these two cases are in fact exactly the same.
Adding, that to my way of thinking, since my “accent” is pretty nuetral,* my reasoning is that what I’m hearing could be considered more accurate since my “regional listening habit” has a more neutral basis.
[SUB]*In fact it’s more a lack of accent than an actual accent. [/SUB]
The person does prolong the word and adds a “w” sound to the “shown” word, really. It must be more subtle than I thought, but it’s plain to me. Maybe it’s the speech therapy I went through as a child, that has given me a sharper ear for such things? 
I had a slight speech impediment, I couldn’t differentiate between “ch” and “sh” sounds when speaking at first so had some speech therapy as a young child. It wasn’t extensive, but the therapist also worked with me to hear other sounds in words as well in an effort to be thorough I suppose. (Later a church elder worked with me and taught me old fashioned elocution.) I’m wondering if part of the problem was a stuffy head, which can affect hearing even back then. I’m very prone to sinus infections now, and have been for some time. Children who are prone to ear infections are sometimes delayed in speech. Anyway, maybe that’s it. Though I’m still fairly certain my parents and little brother would hear the difference as well. (They are still living in Central Kansas, and have for decades. My little brother has been there his whole life.)
It’s natural for every person to believe that his or her own accent is the most “neutral.” Suffice it to say that there is no such thing as a person with a “lack of an accent.” And if it come right down to it, I’d gladly put my West Central Ohio accent up against your Central Kansas accent in a contest for neutrality.
I won’t make any definite conclusion on whose ear is “correct” in this case, but there is also the fact that a person’s pronuncation ear can be affected by “knowing” how a word is “supposed to be” pronounced or being clued in to a difference that one believes “should” exist based on difference in spelling.