pivot
Part of speech: noun
verb
Morphological type: simple
Topics: ball-games
business
computing
engineering
football
games
government
graphical-user-interface
handball
hobbies
lifestyle
mathematics
military
natural-sciences
physical-sciences
politics
programming
sciences
sports
statistics
war
Etymology: From Middle English pevet, *pivot, from Old French pivot (“hinge pin, pivot”) (12th c.), possibly from Latin pūgiō.
Inflected forms:
form: pivots
pos: noun
tags: plural
form: pivots
pos: verb
tags: present
singular
third-person
form: pivoting
pos: verb
tags: participle
present
form: pivoted
pos: verb
tags: participle
past
form: pivoted
pos: verb
tags: past
Senses:
gloss: A thing on which something turns; specifically a metal pointed pin or short shaft in machinery, such as the end of an axle or spindle.
pos: noun
examples: The weight of the body and the traction and braking forces are taken by the conventional dished bogie centre pivot with phosphor-bronze liner; this type of centre pivot facilitates passage over marshalling yard humps.
gloss: Something or someone having a paramount significance in a certain situation.
pos: noun
tags: broadly
figuratively
examples: “The story of this adoption is, of course, the pivot round which all the circumstances of the mysterious tragedy revolved. Mrs. Yule had an only son, namely, William, to whom she was passionately attached ; but, like many a fond mother, she had the desire of mapping out that son's future entirely according to her own ideas.[…]”
Sandy Weill was the man who stitched Citigroup together in the 1990s and in the process helped bury the Glass-Steagall act, a Depression-era law separating retail and investment banking. Last month he performed a perfect pivot: he now wants regulators to undo his previous work.
For Ron Shah, founder of Bizly, a new company that helps hotels book unused meeting rooms, his pivot began with disaster: the day he found his Manhattan office flooded, his conference room under three inches of water. […] Choosing to buy and to lead Spark, he said, “has been one of the greatest pivots I’ve made in life, allowing me to do what I do well.”
gloss: Act of turning on one foot.
pos: noun
gloss: The officer or soldier who simply turns in his place while the company or line moves around him in wheeling.
pos: noun
gloss: A player with responsibility for co-ordinating their team in a particular jam.
pos: noun
gloss: An element of a set to be sorted that is chosen as a midpoint, so as to divide the other elements into two groups to be dealt with recursively.
pos: noun
gloss: A pivot table.
pos: noun
gloss: Any of a row of captioned elements used to navigate to subpages, rather like tabs.
pos: noun
gloss: An element of a matrix that is used as a focus for row operations, such as dividing the row by the pivot, or adding multiples of the row to other rows making all other values in the pivot column 0.
pos: noun
gloss: A pivotal quantity.
pos: noun
gloss: A quarterback.
pos: noun
tags: Canadian
gloss: A circle runner.
pos: noun
gloss: A shift during a general election in a political candidate's messaging to reflect plans and values more moderate than those advocated during the primary.
pos: noun
tags: US
gloss: To turn on an exact spot.
pos: verb
tags: intransitive
gloss: To make a sudden or swift change in strategy, policy, etc.
pos: verb
tags: slang
examples: Mr. Shah’s new business has signed up 25 New York City hotels and raised $1.5 million from angel investors and $3 million from a seed round. Yet three months into his new project, he has had to pivot again, realizing that his best customers are large businesses, not individuals.
“Entrepreneurs usually have some inkling about a problem they can solve,” he said. “But typically they’re not exactly right. So if you survive long enough, you pivot and pivot and pivot and find what sticks.”
It was a fairly common strategy for startups in our space, but we were pivoting so frequently that it didn't quite work for us—if Nick found someone on Monday, by Friday we'd usually pivoted away from that sector so that it made no longer sense, and the advisor share paperwork we'd asked the lawyers to draw up would be left unfiled.
gloss: To make a sudden or swift change in strategy, policy, etc.
pos: verb
tags: US
Related words: fulcrum
pivotal
Derived words: emotional pivot
pivot bridge
pivot gearing
pivot gun
pivotless
pivotlike
pivot man
pivot operation
pivot pin
pivot point
pivot tooth
pivotability
pivotable
pivotman
repivot
stivot
unpivot
Translations: