Shuttle

How to spell shuttle

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce shuttle

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does shuttle mean?

1. nounA vehicle or service that travels back and forth frequently over a short, fixed route.
2. verbTo move or transport repeatedly back and forth between two places.
3. nounA small tool on a loom that carries the weft thread back and forth between the warp threads.

Shuttle in a sentence

• noun

  A free shuttle runs between the car park and the terminal every ten minutes.

• verb

  The volunteers shuttle supplies between the warehouse and the relief centre.

• noun

  The weaver passed the shuttle swiftly across the loom to lay down a row of thread.

• noun

  The hotel offers a shuttle to the conference centre each morning.

• verb

  She has to shuttle between two offices on opposite sides of the city.

• noun

  A wooden shuttle holds the bobbin of weft as it crosses the warp.

Where does shuttle come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word comes from the Old English scytel, which meant a dart or a missile, and it is closely tied to the verb sceotan, meaning 'to shoot'. The connection makes vivid sense once you picture a loom: the small weaving tool was so named because a weaver 'shoots' it rapidly back and forth across the threads, carrying the weft from one side to the other. From that weaving instrument the meaning broadened, so that by the nineteenth and twentieth centuries any vehicle or service running briskly to and fro over a short route could be called a shuttle, giving us shuttle buses, shuttle trains, and eventually the Space Shuttle. The root is solidly Germanic and shares its ancestry with the everyday word 'shoot', which is a useful memory anchor: the spelling keeps the double t and the quiet -le ending that turns the action of shooting into the name of the little tool that does it. Because the word never passed through Latin or French, its plain Anglo-Saxon shape has stayed remarkably stable over the centuries.

How the word is built

• shut- (from Old English scytel: a dart, related to sceotan 'to shoot')
• -le (diminutive/instrument suffix)