Divert

How to spell divert

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce divert

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does divert mean?

1. verbTo change the course or direction of something, sending it along a different route.
2. verbTo turn someone's attention away from something, or to entertain them pleasantly.

Divert in a sentence

• Roadworks on the bridge will divert traffic through the village.

• The magician used a joke to divert the audience's attention from his hands.

• The bank can divert part of your salary into a savings account.

• She told a funny story to divert the children during the long wait.

Where does divert come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word comes from the Latin divertere, which combined the prefix dis-, meaning 'aside' or 'apart', with the verb vertere, meaning 'to turn'. The literal idea was therefore 'to turn aside', whether turning a road, a river, or a person's attention away from its expected path. English took it up in the fifteenth century, partly through the Old French divertir, and it carried both the practical sense of redirecting something and the lighter sense of turning the mind away from worry, which is why entertainment can be called a diversion. The same vertere root that turns up here also drives a large family of English words, including convert, reverse, and version, all of which share the notion of turning. Keeping that root in mind helps with the spelling: it is divert, with a plain di-, and not the doubled letters that trip people up in unrelated words.

How the word is built

• di- (from dis-: aside, apart)
• vert (from vertere: to turn)