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Shifting   /ʃˈɪftɪŋ/   Listen
verb
Shift  v. t.  (past & past part. shifted; pres. part. shifting)  
1.
To divide; to distribute; to apportion. (Obs.) "To which God of his bounty would shift Crowns two of flowers well smelling."
2.
To change the place of; to move or remove from one place to another; as, to shift a burden from one shoulder to another; to shift the blame. "Hastily he schifte him(self)." "Pare saffron between the two St. Mary's days, Or set or go shift it that knowest the ways."
3.
To change the position of; to alter the bearings of; to turn; as, to shift the helm or sails. "Carrying the oar loose, (they) shift it hither and thither at pleasure."
4.
To exchange for another of the same class; to remove and to put some similar thing in its place; to change; as, to shift the clothes; to shift the scenes. "I would advise you to shift a shirt."
5.
To change the clothing of; used reflexively. (Obs.) "As it were to ride day and night; and... not to have patience to shift me."
6.
To put off or out of the way by some expedient. "I shifted him away."
To shift off, to delay; to defer; to put off; to lay aside.
To shift the scene, to change the locality or the surroundings, as in a play or a story. "Shift the scene for half an hour; Time and place are in thy power."


Shift  v. i.  
1.
To divide; to distribute. (Obs.) "Some this, some that, as that him liketh shift."
2.
To make a change or changes; to change position; to move; to veer; to substitute one thing for another; used in the various senses of the transitive verb. "The sixth age shifts Into the lean and slippered pantaloon." "Here the Baillie shifted and fidgeted about in his seat."
3.
To resort to expedients for accomplishing a purpose; to contrive; to manage. "Men in distress will look to themselves, and leave their companions to shift as well as they can."
4.
To practice indirect or evasive methods. "All those schoolmen, though they were exceeding witty, yet better teach all their followers to shift, than to resolve by their distinctions."
5.
(Naut.) To slip to one side of a ship, so as to destroy the equilibrum; said of ballast or cargo; as, the cargo shifted.


adjective
Shifting  adj.  
1.
Changing in place, position, or direction; varying; variable; fickle; as, shifting winds; shifting opinions or principles.
2.
Adapted or used for shifting anything.
Shifting backstays (Naut.), temporary stays that have to be let go whenever the vessel tacks or jibes.
Shifting ballast, ballast which may be moved from one side of a vessel to another as safety requires.
Shifting center. See Metacenter.
Shifting locomotive. See Switching engine, under Switch.





Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48


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"Shifting" Quotes from Famous Books



... was coaling. Along the black wall of her other side, as I peered over the rail above, I saw far below a row of barges crowded with Italians. Powerful lights swung over their heads in the freezing wind, swung above black coal heaps and the lapping water. It was an inferno of shifting ...
— The Harbor • Ernest Poole
... very unreal; one minute the voices sounded up in the sky, and the next in his very ears, while the figures moved about, sometimes bending over him, sometimes retreating and melting away like shadows on a shifting screen. ...
— Jimbo - A Fantasy • Algernon Blackwood
... with a merry westerly gale. When about seven leagues off (twenty-two miles) some gusts or scuds of wind suddenly arose, and the wind veering and shifting from point to point, was, as they say, like an old woman's breech, at no certainty; so we first got our starboard tacks aboard, and hauled off our lee-sheets. Then the gusts increased, and by fits blowed all at once from several quarters, yet we neither settled ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... of my breakfast while Uncle Jake was changing his boots and shifting his outer clothing. He would accept only one of my small cheese sandwiches. "I got some bread and butter here," he said, but I 'took partic'lar notice,' as Tony puts it, that he ate none of the bread and butter. And he refused to take a second sip of my tea because his sensitive nose detected ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... into the air. The fine dust is stirred up in yellow clouds and moves along the road; the tramp of hoofs in unison resounds afar; the horses race along, pricking up their ears; in front of all, with his tail in the air and thistles in his tangled mane, prances some shaggy chestnut, constantly shifting his ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Works of Ivan Turgenev, Vol. I • Ivan Turgenev


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