shuttle
/ˈʃʌtəl/
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 3.90 in modern English
10
Scrabble Score
7
Letters
2
Syllables
6
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
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.
noun
A transport service (such as a bus or train) that goes back and forth between two or more places.
noun
Such a transport vehicle; a shuttle bus; a space shuttle.
noun
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).
noun
A shuttlecock.
Example Sentences
- "My dayes are ſwifter then a weauers ſhuttle, and are ſpent without hope."
- "Like shuttles through the loom, so swiftly glide My feather'd hours, and all my hopes deride!."
- "By placing the sword edgewise, the weaver keeps the countershed open, in order to shoot through the shuttle."
- "The shuttle bus runs to the airport on a half-hourly basis from the central station."
- "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."
- "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."
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.
Origin
Word Breakdown
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /ˈʃʌtəl/