switch

Forms

1.A device to turn electric current on and off or direct its flow.
2.A change or exchange.
- After many complications and sudden switches of career and identity for all […] they end up selling out for fame and money, and leave the boardwalk for good.
- This is a result of a switch from High Street to online retailing, requiring consumer goods to be delivered to the door from large-scale distribution parks that have sufficient traffic to justify a rail terminal.
3.A movable section of railroad track which allows the train to be directed down one of two destination tracks; (set of) points.
4.A long, slender woody plant stem or a flexible, thin rod used as a whip to administer corporal punishment in the United States.
- "A proper switch is a slim, flexible branch off a tree or a bush. A switch applied to the buttocks stings fiercely. It may leave red marks or bruises, but it causes no lasting damage."

1.To exchange.
- I want to switch this red dress for a green one.
2.To change places, tasks, etc.
- I want to switch to a different seat.
3.To change (something) to the specified state using a switch.
- When switched on, air brakes activate car by car, from the locomotive to the back of the train.
4.To whip or hit with a switch.
- They were looking on the ground, absorbed in thought. The manager was switching his leg with a slender twig: his sagacious relative lifted his head.

Uncommon· #2514

Perhaps from Middle Dutch swijch (“twig”), first attested in c.

1592.

The mechanical device for altering the direction of something sense is first attested in c.

1797, pertaining to pivoted rails on minecart railways, which were once wooden.