shunt
To cause to move (suddenly), as by pushing or shoving; to give a (sudden) start to.
transitive
For we are all shunting—shunting—shunting / We're all shunting in this queer world of ours. / Nations are shunted like to our railway carriages: / As Napoleon shunted la belle France into war; / Princes are shunted into royal marriages; / Kings and Queens are shunted just like a railway car.
To divert to a less important place, position, or state.
transitive
Here in England it is, thank God! the custom for us to shunt ourselves off the grand trunk railroad of business, in tearing up and down which our lives are mainly passed, into some quiet siding once every year. […] [W]hen July is running into August, and everything is breaking up, you feel that your business for the season—be it in commerce, law, or literature—is achieved, and that the time for your being temporarily shunted has arrived.
To provide with a shunt.
transitive
Routine preoperative shunting of tumor patients is no longer common practice because many patients remain shunt free after tumor removal. Dias and Albright reported a series of 58 patients with posterior fossa tumors and hydrocephalus. Twenty-five patients were shunted preoperatively, 17 had external ventricular drains (EVDs) and 16 had no preoperative ventricular catheterization. Twenty-four of the 33 patients not initially shunted remained shunt free at long-term follow-up.
To move data in memory to a physical disk.
transitive
A momentary power spike had caused a blip, forcing the backup system to shunt Carella's current work into a safety file. It was standard operating procedure, a decision made by the online computer itself.
Where it comes from
From Middle English schonten, schunten (“to jerk, swerve; to dodge, escape”), either: * possibly a back-formation from Middle English schonen (“to avoid, refuse, hate, fear”), from Old English sċunian, sċyniġan; see shun. Or * an alteration of Middle English *schunden, *schynden, from Old English sċyndan, sċendan (“to hasten, hurry”) (as in āsċyndan (“to remove, take away”), from Proto-West Germanic *skundijan, from Proto-Germanic *skundijaną (“to impel, hasten”). * from unrecorded Old English *sċunettan, a derivative of sċunian (“to shun, avoid”). As regards the noun sense, compare Middle English shunt (“swerve; sudden jerk”), derived from the verb.
Adapted from the Wiktionary entry shunt (CC BY-SA 4.0).