The puncturing and shortening technique are two important approaches to constructing new linear codes from old ones. In the past 70 years, a lot of progress on the puncturing technique has been made, and many works on punctured linear codes have been done. Many families of linear codes with interesting parameters have been obtained with the puncturing technique. However, little research on the shortening technique has been done and there are only a handful references on shortened linear codes. The first objective of this paper is to prove some general theory for shortened linear codes. The second objective is to study some shortened codes of the Hamming codes, Simplex codes, some Reed-Muller codes, and ovoid codes. Eleven families of optimal shortened codes with interesting parameters are presented in this paper. As a byproduct, five infinite families of $2$-designs are also constructed from some of the shortened codes presented in this paper.