shuttle
Meanings
noun
- A tool used to carry the woof back and forth between the warp threads on a loom.
- The sliding thread holder in a sewing machine, which carries the lower thread through a loop of the upper thread, to make a lock stitch.
- A transport service (such as a bus or train) that goes back and forth between two or more places.
- Such a transport vehicle; a shuttle bus; a space shuttle.
- Any other item that moves repeatedly back and forth between two positions, possibly transporting something else with it between those points (such as, in chemistry, a molecular shuttle).
- A shuttlecock.
- A shutter, as for a channel for molten metal.
verb
- To go or send back and forth between two places.
- To transport by shuttle or by means of a shuttle service.
Pronunciation
Word forms
Etymology
From a merger of two words: * Middle English shutel, shotel, schetel, schettell, schyttyl, scutel (“bar; bolt”), from Old English sċyttel, sċutel (“bar; bolt”), equivalent to shut + -le * Middle English shutel, schetil, shotil, shetel, schootyll, shutyll, schytle, scytyl (“missile; projectile; spear”), from Old English sċytel, sċutel (“dart, arrow”), from Proto-Germanic *skutilaz. The name for a loom weaving instrument, recorded from 1338, is from a sense of being "shot" across the threads. The back-and-forth imagery inspired the extension to "passenger trains" in 1895, aircraft in 1942, and spacecraft in 1969, as well as older terms such as shuttlecock.
Synonyms
Derived words
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