Shift vs Twist - What's the difference?
shift | twist |
To change, swap.
* {{quote-magazine, date=2012-03, author=William E. Carter, Merri Sue Carter
, volume=100, issue=2, page=87, magazine=(American Scientist)
, title= To move from one place to another; to redistribute.
* {{quote-magazine, date=2013-06-22, volume=407, issue=8841, page=68, magazine=(The Economist)
, title= To change position.
(obsolete) To change (one's clothes); also to change (someone's) underclothes.
*, II.ii.2:
* Shakespeare
To change gears (in a car).
(typewriters) To move the keys of a typewriter over in order to type capital letters and special characters.
(computer keyboards) To switch to a character entry mode for capital letters and special characters.
(computing) To manipulate a binary number by moving all of its digits left or right; compare rotate.
(computing) To remove the first value from an array.
To dispose of.
To hurry.
(Ireland, vulgar, slang) To engage in sexual petting.
To resort to expedients for accomplishing a purpose; to contrive; to manage.
* L'Estrange
To practice indirect or evasive methods.
* Sir Walter Raleigh
(historical) a type of women's undergarment, a slip
*
* '>citation
* 1919 ,
a change of workers, now specifically a set group of workers or period of working time
an act of shifting; a slight movement or change
* Sir H. Wotton
* {{quote-news, year=2012, date=November 7, author=Matt Bai, title=Winning a Second Term, Obama Will Confront Familiar Headwinds, work=New York Times
, passage=The generational shift Mr. Obama once embodied is, in fact, well under way, but it will not change Washington as quickly — or as harmoniously — as a lot of voters once hoped.}}
(US) the gear mechanism in a motor vehicle
(computing) a bit shift
(baseball) The infield shift.
The act of sexual petting.
(archaic) A contrivance, device to try when other methods fail
* 1596 , Shakespeare, History of King John
(archaic) a trick, an artifice
* 1593 , Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew
* Macaulay
* Shakespeare
* Dryden
In building, the extent, or arrangement, of the overlapping of plank, brick, stones, etc., that are placed in courses so as to break joints.
(mining) A breaking off and dislocation of a seam; a fault.
A twisting force.
Anything twisted, or the act of twisting.
* 1906 , (Edith Nesbit), (The Railway Children) Chapter 8
* Addison
The form given in twisting.
* Arbuthnot
The degree of stress or strain when twisted.
A type of thread made from two filaments twisted together.
* 1596 , (Edmund Spenser), (The Faerie Queene) , IV.ii:
A sliver of lemon peel added to a cocktail, etc.
* 2005 , Theodore J. Albasini, The Progeny
A sudden bend (or short series of bends) in a road, path, etc.
* 1899 , Edith Nesbit, The Wouldbegoods
* , chapter=1
, title= A distortion to the meaning of a word or passage.
An unexpected turn in a story, tale, etc.
* {{quote-news, 1987, October 23, Caryn James, Movie Review: No Man's Land (1987), New York Times
, passage=Though set in Los Angeles, the film has a familiar, television look and feel - two handsome partners, cops, criminals, fast cars and a marginal romance. The twist in the buddy-car-chase formula is that here the good guys tend to blur into the bad.}}
* {{quote-news, year=2012, date=May 24, author=Nathan Rabin, work=The Onion AV Club
, title= A type of dance characterised by rotating one’s hips. See
* {{quote-news, 1997, April 22, Jennifer Dunning, Surviving It All, Dismissals, Tours and Balanchine, New York Times
, passage=She taught him to do the twist , having learned it herself from an Alvin Ailey dancer at Jacob's Pillow. }}
A rotation of the body when diving.
A sprain, especially to the ankle.
(obsolete) A twig.
(slang) A girl, a woman.
* 1990 , (w, Miller's Crossing), 01:08:20
(obsolete) A roll of twisted dough, baked.
A material for gun barrels, consisting of iron and steel twisted and welded together.
The spiral course of the rifling of a gun barrel or a cannon.
(obsolete, slang) A beverage made of brandy and gin.
To turn the ends of something, usually thread, rope etc., in opposite directions, often using force.
To join together by twining one part around another.
* 1900 , , (The Wonderful Wizard of Oz) Chapter 15
To contort; to writhe; to complicate; to crook spirally; to convolve.
* Alexander Pope
To wreathe; to wind; to encircle; to unite by intertexture of parts.
* Waller
* T. Burnet
(reflexive) To wind into; to insinuate.
To turn a knob etc.
To distort or change the truth or meaning of words when repeating.
* Exodus 23:8
To form a twist (in any of the above noun meanings).
To injure (a body part) by bending it in the wrong direction.
* 1913 , (George Bernard Shaw), Act V
* 1901 , (Henry Lawson), Joe Wilson's Courtship
(of a path) To wind; to follow a bendy or wavy course; to have many bends.
* , chapter=1
, title= * 1926 , , He
To cause to rotate.
* 1911 , (John Masefield), Jim Davis Chapter 8
To dance the twist (a type of dance characterised by twisting one's hips).
To coax.
* 1932 , Robert E. Howard, Dark Shanghai
(card games) In the game of blackjack (pontoon or twenty-one), to be dealt another card.
In transitive terms the difference between shift and twist
is that shift is to dispose of while twist is to coax.In intransitive terms the difference between shift and twist
is that shift is to hurry while twist is to dance the twist (a type of dance characterised by twisting one's hips).shift
English
(wikipedia shift)Verb
(en verb)The British Longitude Act Reconsidered, passage=But was it responsible governance to pass the Longitude Act without other efforts to protect British seamen? Or might it have been subterfuge—a disingenuous attempt to shift attention away from the realities of their life at sea.}}
T time, passage=The ability to shift profits to low-tax countries by locating intellectual property in them, which is then licensed to related businesses in high-tax countries, is often assumed to be the preserve of high-tech companies. […] current tax rules make it easy for all sorts of firms to generate […] “stateless income”: profit subject to tax in a jurisdiction that is neither the location of the factors of production that generate the income nor where the parent firm is domiciled.}}
- 'Tis very good to wash his hands and face often, to shift his clothes, to have fair linen about him, to be decently and comely attired […].
- As it were to ride day and night; andnot to have patience to shift me.
- Men in distress will look to themselves, and leave their companions to shift as well as they can.
- All those schoolmen, though they were exceeding witty, yet better teach all their followers to shift , than to resolve by their distinctions.
Noun
(en noun)- Just last week she bought a new shift at the market.
- No; without a gown, in a shift that was somewhat of the coarsest, and none of the cleanest, bedewed likewise with some odoriferous effluvia, the produce of the day's labour, with a pitchfork in her hand, Molly Seagrim approached.
- Some wear black shifts and flesh-coloured stockings; some with curly hair, dyed yellow, are dressed like little girls in short muslin frocks.
- We'll work three shifts a day till the job's done.
- My going to Oxford was not merely for shift of air.
- There was a shift in the political atmosphere.
citation
- Does it come with a stick-shift ?
- If you press shift -P, the preview display will change.
- Teams often use the shift against this lefty.
- If I get down, and do not break my limbs,
- I'll find a thousand shifts to get away:
- As good to die and go, as die and stay.
- And if the boy have not a woman's gift
- To rain a shower of commanded tears,
- An onion will do well for such a shift
- Reduced to pitiable shifts .
- I'll find a thousand shifts to get away.
- Little souls on little shifts rely.
Derived terms
* blueshift * day shift * graveyard shift * make shift * night shift * preshift * shift break * shiftwork, shift work * split shift * swing shift * stickshift * redshift * (French kissing) get the shifttwist
English
(wikipedia twist)Noun
(en noun)- Peter was always proud afterwards when he remembered that, with the Bargee's furious fingers tightening on his ear, the Bargee's crimson countenance close to his own, the Bargee's hot breath on his neck, he had the courage to speak the truth.
- "I wasn't catching fish," said Peter.
- "That's not your fault, I'll be bound," said the man, giving Peter's ear a twist'—not a hard one—but still a ' twist .
- Not the least turn or twist in the fibres of any one animal which does not render them more proper for that particular animal's way of life than any other cast or texture.
- [He] shrunk at first sight of it; he found fault with the length, the thickness, and the twist .
- the thrid / By griesly Lachesis was spun with paine, / That cruell Atropos eftsoones vndid, / With cursed knife cutting the twist in twaine [...].
- Bunny sat on the only remaining stool at the leather-padded oval bar in the Iron Lounge. It was happy hour, two drinks for the price of one. She decided on a martini with a twist , and while the bartender was preparing her drink, she scanned the faces looking at the bar.
- But here a twist in the stream brought us out from the bushes
Mr. Pratt's Patients, chapter=1 , passage=I stumbled along through the young pines and huckleberry bushes. Pretty soon I struck into a sort of path that, I cal'lated, might lead to the road I was hunting for. It twisted and turned, and, the first thing I knew, made a sudden bend around a bunch of bayberry scrub and opened out into a big clear space like a lawn.}}
Film: Reviews: Men In Black 3, passage=In the abstract, Stuhlbarg’s twinkly-eyed sidekick suggests Joe Pesci in Lethal Weapon 2 by way of late-period Robin Williams with an alien twist , but Stuhlbarg makes a character that easily could have come across as precious into a surprisingly palatable, even charming man.}}
- (Chaucer)
- (Fairfax)
- (Dane, speaking about a woman character) "I'll see where the twist flops"
Descendants
* German: (l)Verb
(en verb)- "Well, one day I went up in a balloon and the ropes got twisted , so that I couldn't come down again. It went way up above the clouds, so far that a current of air struck it and carried it many, many miles away. For a day and a night I traveled through the air, and on the morning of the second day I awoke and found the balloon floating over a strange and beautiful country."
- Twist it into a serpentine form.
- longing to twist bays with that ivy
- There are pillars of smoke twisted about wreaths of flame.
- Avarice twists itself into all human concerns.
- And you will not take a bribe, because a bribe will blind the alert, and will twist the words of the righteous.
- Oh, you are a devil. You can twist the heart in a girl as easy as some could twist her arms to hurt her. Mrs. Pearce warned me. Time and again she has wanted to leave you; and you always got round her at the last minute. And you don't care a bit for her. And you don't care a bit for me.
- Then Romany went down, then we fell together, and the chaps separated us. I got another knock-down blow in, and was beginning to enjoy the novelty of it, when Romany staggered and limped.
- ‘I’ve done,’ he said. ‘I’ve twisted my ankle.’ He’d caught his heel against a tuft of grass.
Mr. Pratt's Patients, chapter=1 , passage=I stumbled along through the young pines and huckleberry bushes. Pretty soon I struck into a sort of path that, I cal'lated, might lead to the road I was hunting for. It twisted and turned, and, the first thing I knew, made a sudden bend around a bunch of bayberry scrub and opened out into a big clear space like a lawn.}}
- My coming to New York had been a mistake; for whereas I had looked for poignant wonder and inspiration in the teeming labyrinths of ancient streets that twist endlessly from forgotten courts and squares and waterfronts to courts and squares and waterfronts equally forgotten, and in the Cyclopean modern towers and pinnacles that rise blackly Babylonian under waning moons, I had found instead only a sense of horror and oppression which threatened to master, paralyze, and annihilate me.
- The tide seized us and swept us along, and in the races where this happened there were sucking whirlpools, strong enough to twist us round.
- "On the three-thousand-dollar reward John Bain is offerin' for the return of his sister," said Ace. "Now listen--I know a certain big Chinee had her kidnapped outa her 'rickshaw out at the edge of the city one evenin'. He's been keepin' her prisoner in his house, waitin' a chance to send her up-country to some bandit friends of his'n; then they'll be in position to twist a big ransome outa John Bain, see? [...]"