And to make this answer complete (with regard to the OP), no these don’t qualify as chips. Wood chips are thicker than wood shavings. The distinction gets gray, of course, but as a rough guide I’d say wood chips are thicker than 1 mm and wood shavings are thinner than 1 mm. Or thereabouts. If held in a flame, a wood chip would catch fire fairly easily, but a wood shaving would ignite almost immediately and be consumed in just a few seconds.

I agree with that. Chips generally result from breakage across a surface or discrete blows more obliquely (as from a chisel). Shavings result from continuous sliding of a very sharp object (as a plane) along and nearly parallel to the surface.

And taken together—when considered as the waste material resulting from some shaping process—the shavings and chips collectively are called swarf, though this term is fairly technical and not in wide, everyday use.

@PaulTanenbaum - swarf management was a big thing at one place I worked at. Steel shavings can cut badly.

Ouch! I can imagine that they constitute a big safety hazard.

@PaulTanenbaum - Staff were trained to avoid handling swarf with bare hands (it was a rule). Also goggles or face shields were worn. There is almost always some money to be made from swarf in quantity.

@MichaelHarvey Interestingly, when I did machining for my father, who was a mechanical engineer, we called the waste material "chips" even when they came off the piece on a lathe in long spirals.

@DavidK - 'Swarf, also known as chips or by other process-specific names are pieces of metal, wood, or plastic that are the debris or waste resulting from machining,' Wikipedia

@MichaelHarvey I just think it is interesting that the different kinds of swarf are named in such an idiosyncratic way depending on material and process. There are wood chips and metal chips but they are made differently; but you can make either metal chips or wood shavings using essentially the same process.

@DavidK - considering the kind of person my father was, I am so glad that nobody would ever call me a 'chip off the old block'.

@Paul And then there are potato chips, which (when not powder- or mash-based) are made by sliding a very sharp object obliquely through the object, which is sort of half of each.

@JanusBahsJacquet - I wondered when we would get around to them. We call them 'crisps' in the UK, as you have probably seen elsewhere.

@Michael I was primarily thinking of the thin slices eaten cold, not the strips eaten hot, but the point really works for either – the strips, too, are made by sliding a sharp object obliquely through the potato, and neither really ‘chip off’ or is ‘shaved off’ from it. The thing that I would say it would be most accurate to describe as potato chips, in terms of shape and size, would be the kind of coarsely grated potato you use to make rösti – but ironically, those are absolutely never called chips.

@JanusBahsJacquet - I am puzzled by your reference to hot potato strips... are those what we call 'chips' in the UK? Eaten with fish?

@Michael Yes, exactly. Potatoes cut into rectangular strips, deep fried and eaten hot. I wanted to deliberately avoid using ‘chips’ or ‘crisps’, since those terms are so convoluted and confused – Pringles being labelled crisps even in the US, ‘chips’ (without modifier) referring with almost equal frequency to either type in the Antipodes and South Africa, corn/wheat/other-based ones being chips in the UK, etc. ‘Fries’ is fairly unambiguous, except to the extent that some places refer to the slim ones as ‘(French) fries’ and the thicker ones as ‘chips’. It’s a proper minefield.

@JanusBahsJacquet - I am old enough to recall 'freedom fries' - not that I would ever dream of calling them that.

I always get slightly worried when people start talking about being ‘old enough to remember’ things that I still consider recent events (such as the French opposition to the invasion of Iraq twenty years ago) …

If done on a lathe, they are called chips.

In metal turning, the long, curly shavings can tangle in the machine and cause problems with surface finish, tool wear, or material handling. Sometimes the tool doing the cutting has a "chip breaker" to cause the shavings to break into small, more easily cleared and handled "chips"-- machinemfg.com/chip-breakers-guide

@JanusBahsJacquet - but don't you know that the most important people in the world are the Tik-Tok generation, who weren't even born 20 years ago?

Shavings curl naturally, chips don't. (When we are talking about wood, rather than potato.)

@MichaelHarvey has, of course, explained it perfectly. Shavings are (you guessed it :) ) made by shaving. Chips are made by chipping.

@DKNguyen - in my country, they are often called 'turnings'.

@MichaelHarvey What are they called on a mill?

@DKNguyen I call that stuff mill swarf.

Okie here can vouch that "pencil shavings" is the term for it on this side of the pond as well.

@DKNguyen usually it's still shavings on a wood lathe. youtube.com/watch?v=mUATd-3SRRM though chips on metal lathe. (a wood lathe is a lathe for cutting wood, not a lathe made of wood)