shuttle

To go or send back and forth between two places.

Noun

  1. A tool used to carry the woof back and forth between the warp threads on a loom.
    • My dayes are ſwifter then a weauers ſhuttle, and are ſpent without hope. - 1611, The Holy Bible, […] (King James Version), London: […] Robert Barker, […], →OCLC, Job 7:6:
    • Like shuttles through the loom, so swiftly glide My feather'd hours, and all my hopes deride!. - 1638, George Sandys, A Paraphrase upon Job:
    • By placing the sword edgewise, the weaver keeps the countershed open, in order to shoot through the shuttle. - 2013 November 11, Claus-Dieter Brauns, “Food and Clothing”, in Mru: Hill People on the Border of Bangladesh,...
  2. 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.
  3. A transport service (such as a bus or train) that goes back and forth between two or more places.
    • 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...
  4. Such a transport vehicle; a shuttle bus; a space shuttle.
    • 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. - 2004, Dawn of the Dead, 1:14:20:
  5. 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).
  6. A shuttlecock.
  7. A shutter, as for a channel for molten metal.

Origin

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.

Forms

shuttles

Derived

multishuttle nanoshuttle shuttlebay shuttle box shuttle bus shuttlebus shuttlecock shuttle conveyor shuttlecraft shuttle diplomacy shuttle driver shuttleless shuttlelike shuttleport shuttle race shuttle run shuttle trade shuttle vector shuttlewise Space Shuttle space shuttle weavers' shuttle

Verb

  1. To go or send back and forth between two places.
    • On several occasions during the next several months my attempts to see the logs were met alternately with this denial of their existence or a denial of my right to see them. After being shuttled from station to...
  2. To transport by shuttle or by means of a shuttle service.
    • Guests can be shuttled to and from the hotel for no extra cost.
    • It may get even busier in town when a sleek train service called the Brightline debuts this summer, shuttling travelers between nearby West Palm Beach and Miami. - 2017 March 1, Hannah Seligson, “Where to get hip in...

    Synonyms: chauffeur

Forms

shuttles shuttling shuttled

Derived

shuttler