Word: shunt Part of Speech: verb Etymology: From Middle English schonten, schunten (“to jerk, swerve; to dodge, escape”), either: * possibly a back-formation from Middle English schonen (“to avoid, refuse, hate, fear”), from Old English sċunian, sċyniġan; see shun. Or * an alteration of Middle English *schunden, *schynden, from Old English sċyndan, sċendan (“to hasten, hurry”) (as in āsċyndan (“to remove, take away”), from Proto-West Germanic *skundijan, from Proto-Germanic *skundijaną (“to impel, hasten”). * from unrecorded Old English *sċunettan, a derivative of sċunian (“to shun, avoid”). As regards the noun sense, compare Middle English shunt (“swerve; sudden jerk”), derived from the verb. Pronunciation: /ʃʌnt/, /ʃənt/, /ʃant/, /ʃʊnt/ 1. To cause to move (suddenly), as by pushing or shoving; to give a (sudden) start to. Labels: transitive Example: For we are all shunting—shunting—shunting / We're all shunting in this queer world of ours. / Nations are shunted like to our railway carriages: / As Napoleon shunted la belle France into war; / Princes are shunted into royal marriages; / Kings and Queens are shunted just like a railway car. Example: The comet was burning blue in the distance, like a sickly torch, when I first sighted him, but he begun to grow bigger and bigger as I crept up on him. […] Thinks I, it won't do to run into him, so I shunted to one side and tore along. By and by I closed up abreast of his tail. 2. To divert to a less important place, position, or state. Labels: transitive Example: Here in England it is, thank God! the custom for us to shunt ourselves off the grand trunk railroad of business, in tearing up and down which our lives are mainly passed, into some quiet siding once every year. […] [W]hen July is running into August, and everything is breaking up, you feel that your business for the season—be it in commerce, law, or literature—is achieved, and that the time for your being temporarily shunted has arrived. Example: This important question of the acquisition of Native lands has been treated as a perfect shuttlecock in the hands of the Government. […] So far as we know, it has not even been circulated amongst the Natives, so that it would be a monstrous thing to pass it into law this session. This question will therefore be necessarily shunted—the one question that is admitted to be of supreme importance to the Colony of New Zealand. Then, the question of the Native Land Courts is another of those which have been shunted. 3. To provide with a shunt. Labels: transitive Example: to shunt a galvanometer Example: Routine preoperative shunting of tumor patients is no longer common practice because many patients remain shunt free after tumor removal. Dias and Albright reported a series of 58 patients with posterior fossa tumors and hydrocephalus. Twenty-five patients were shunted preoperatively, 17 had external ventricular drains (EVDs) and 16 had no preoperative ventricular catheterization. Twenty-four of the 33 patients not initially shunted remained shunt free at long-term follow-up. 4. To move data in memory to a physical disk. Labels: transitive Example: A momentary power spike had caused a blip, forcing the backup system to shunt Carella's current work into a safety file. It was standard operating procedure, a decision made by the online computer itself. 5. To divert electric current by providing an alternative path. Labels: transitive Example: The method of running an electric motor herein set out, which consists in starting the motor with the two halves of its armature in series with a resistance in a two-pole field, then gradually cutting out the resistance, then including the resistance and shunting one-half the motor, then opening the circuit of the shunted half and throwing the two halves of the motor in multiple in a four-pole field, and finally, cutting out the resistance. 6. To move a train from one track to another, or to move carriages, etc. from one train to another. Labels: transitive Example: Porter, run over while shunting a luggage train, in consequence of his getting entangled in shunting-rope. Example: But despite its plague of tunnels, the run-in on this route is of unusual interest to the locomotive enthusiast: besides the hordes of self-important saddle-tanks shunting in the extensive yards, there was at one time the chance of seeing those slender little North London engines, with their large outside cylinders and no visible storage place for coal, and also an occasional South Eastern locomotive sporting a lot of polished brass. 7. To have a minor collision, especially in a motor car. Labels: UK, informal, transitive Example: The main argument for the use of culpability as a categorizer is that some accidents can be said to be independent of the behaviour of at least one of the drivers, for example, being shunted when having stopped for a red light (in a slow and controlled manner, at least). 8. To divert the flow of a body fluid. Labels: transitive Example: There are times when one has no alternative other than to attempt to shunt the cerebrospinal fluid into the pleural cavity, a potential space, which may occasionally be capable of absorbing the fluid. 9. To turn aside or away; to divert. Labels: UK, dialectal, obsolete, transitive 10. To carry on arbitrage between the London stock exchange and provincial stock exchanges. Labels: UK, historical