shuttle
Language: English
Part of speech: noun
Pronunciation: ipa: /ˈʃʌtəl/
ipa: [ˈʃʌɾəɫ]
rhymes: -ʌtəl
Forms: form: shuttles
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.
Senses: examples: text: My dayes are ſwifter then a weauers ſhuttle, and are ſpent without hope.
ref: 1611, The Holy Bible, […] (King James Version), London: […] Robert Barker, […], →OCLC, Job 7:6:
text: Like shuttles through the loom, so swiftly glide
My feather'd hours, and all my hopes deride!.
ref: 1638, George Sandys, A Paraphrase upon Job:
text: By placing the sword edgewise, the weaver keeps the countershed open, in order to shoot through the shuttle.
ref: 2013 November 11, Claus-Dieter Brauns, “Food and Clothing”, in Mru: Hill People on the Border of Bangladesh, Basel: Birkhäuser, page 131:
topics: business
manufacturing
textiles
weaving
glosses: A tool used to carry the woof back and forth between the warp threads on a loom.
glosses: 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.
examples: text: The shuttle bus runs to the airport on a half-hourly basis from the central station.
text: And until December 2010 the northern stretch of the 'Extension' featured a charming side-show: the Chesham Shuttle. [...] But the people of Chesham moaned about the shuttle: the waiting room at Chalfont & Latimer was too hot, or too cold; there were leaves on the line. [...] On 12 Dec 2010 the shuttle ceased operations and Metropolitan trains began to terminate at both Amersham and Chesham.
ref: 2012, Andrew Martin, Underground Overground: A passenger's history of the Tube, Profile Books, →ISBN, pages 76, 77:
glosses: A transport service (such as a bus or train) that goes back and forth between two or more places.
examples: text: You're saying we take the parking shuttles, reinforce them with aluminum siding and then head to the gun store where our friend Andy plays some cowboy-movie, jump-on-the-wagon bullshit.
ref: 2004, Dawn of the Dead, 1:14:20:
glosses: Such a transport vehicle; a shuttle bus; a space shuttle.
glosses: 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).
glosses: A shuttlecock.
glosses: A shutter, as for a channel for molten metal.
Derived terms: shuttle box
shuttle bus
shuttlebus
shuttlecock
shuttle conveyor
shuttlecraft
shuttle diplomacy
shuttle driver
shuttleless
shuttle race
shuttle run
shuttle trade
shuttle vector
shuttlewise
Space Shuttle
space shuttle
weavers' shuttle