shunt
Part of speech: verb
noun
Morphological type: simple
Topics: biology
business
computing
electrical-engineering
electricity
electromagnetism
energy
engineering
finance
firearms
government
mathematics
medicine
military
natural-sciences
pathology
physical-sciences
physics
politics
rail-transport
railways
road
sciences
surgery
tools
transport
veterinary
war
weaponry
zoology
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.
Inflected forms:
form: shunts
pos: verb
tags: present
singular
third-person
form: shunting
pos: verb
tags: participle
present
form: shunted
pos: verb
tags: participle
past
form: shunted
pos: verb
tags: past
form: shunts
pos: noun
tags: plural
Senses:
gloss: To cause to move (suddenly), as by pushing or shoving; to give a (sudden) start to.
pos: verb
tags: transitive
examples: 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.
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.
gloss: To divert to a less important place, position, or state.
pos: verb
tags: transitive
examples: 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.
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.
Even as the new king appeared on the balcony of Buckingham Palace in a downpour to view a weather-attenuated flyby, much of the press attention focused on Harry’s absence. (Charles’s heir, Prince William, was shunted off to the side with his family.)
gloss: To provide with a shunt.
pos: verb
tags: transitive
examples: to shunt a galvanometer
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.
gloss: To move data in memory to a physical disk.
pos: verb
tags: transitive
examples: 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.
gloss: To divert electric current by providing an alternative path.
pos: verb
tags: transitive
examples: 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.
gloss: To move a train from one track to another, or to move carriages, etc. from one train to another.
pos: verb
tags: transitive
examples: Porter, run over while shunting a luggage train, in consequence of his getting entangled in shunting-rope.
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.
On arrival at Spiez, the locomotive (No. 206) was immediately uncoupled and drew ahead to enable an Italian through coach from Interlaken to Milan to be loose shunted (with passengers aboard and controlled by means of its handbrake) on to the front of the train.
gloss: To have a minor collision, especially in a motor car.
pos: verb
tags: UK
informal
transitive
examples: 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).
gloss: To divert the flow of a body fluid.
pos: verb
tags: transitive
examples: 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.
gloss: To turn aside or away; to divert.
pos: verb
tags: UK
dialectal
obsolete
transitive
gloss: To carry on arbitrage between the London stock exchange and provincial stock exchanges.
pos: verb
tags: UK
historical
gloss: An act of moving (suddenly), as due to a push or shove.
pos: noun
examples: Blindside loosie Jerome Kaino got [Conor] Murray after he'd kicked in the 10th minute, then the halfback hurt a wrist after Brodie Retallick gave him a shunt.
gloss: A connection used as an alternative path between parts of an electrical circuit.
pos: noun
examples: The sensibility of a galvanometer may be varied in a very simple manner by the use of what is termed a shunt. A shunt is a resistance coil, or coil of fine wire used to divert some definite portion of a current, taking it past a galvanometer instead of through its coils.
gloss: The shifting of the studs on a projectile from the deep to the shallow sides of the grooves in its discharge from a shunt gun.
pos: noun
examples: In length, this gun was the same as the French, but weighed 9 cwt. less. It was rifled in six grooves on the shunt plan, in the form in which it has been generally applied to large guns, with the difference that some of the angles of the grooving were rounded off. […] To impede fouling, a slightly greater windage was allowed in the chamber of the shunt gun, the diameter there being 0.04 greater than at the mouth of the bore.
The shunt system, of which the 64-pr. is the only example now in the service, has been considered inferior to the Woolwich, because besides being unnecessarily complicated, the grooves which are cut with abrupt sharp angles weaken the gun. […] [I]n the shunt gun, however, in addition to the mere fact of the driving side of the double groove being shallow, and the loading side deep, the two grooves join in one deep one at 2 feet 7.5 inches from the muzzle, […]
gloss: An abnormal passage between body channels.
pos: noun
examples: Portosystemic shunts can be congenital or acquired with congenital PSS commonly comprising a single communicating vessel between the portal venous circulation and the systemic circulation via the caudal vena cava or azygos vein. Of congenital shunts, 66–75% are extrahepatic. Intrahepatic portosystemic shunts are most commonly identified in larger breeds of dog (though we have also seen a number of terriers with intrahepatic shunts through our clinic).
gloss: A passage between body channels constructed surgically as a bypass; a tube inserted into the body to create such a passage.
pos: noun
examples: We present an extremely rare case of delayed and combined ventriculoperitoneal shunt blockage, viscus perforation and migration into the urethra manifested by a repeated urinary tract infection. This was discovered six months after the shunt was inserted.
gloss: A switch on a railway used to move a train from one track to another.
pos: noun
examples: These improvements consist, firstly, in a novel construction of apparatus to be attached to or applied upon railways, at those parts termed switches, shunts, or moveable rails, which are commonly used for transferring engines, carriages, or trains, from one line of rails to another, as occasion may require, and which apparatus I call a "switch or shunt protector."
gloss: A minor collision between vehicles.
pos: noun
tags: UK
informal
examples: At the first race in Brazil, I became involved in a four-car shunt. I won't go into too much detail now, except to say that the accident had nothing to do with me. […] Everyone else was avoiding the accident when [Jos] Verstappen lost control on the grass, came right into me – and off we all went. It was a huge shunt.
Derived words: Ayrton shunt
backshunt
headshunt
head shunt
microshunt
minishunt
mis-shunt
universal shunt
Wade-Dahl-Till shunt
Translations: