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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



... false image of what has been the result of our subjecting it to a jet of fervent, though nowise brilliant, thought to-night. It has become luminous, and its clear rays, penetrating the abyss of the remote past, have brought within our ken some stages of the evolution of the earth. And in the shifting "without haste, but without rest" of the land and sea, as in the endless variation of the forms assumed by living beings, we have observed nothing but the natural product of the forces originally possessed by the ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... straightened, but without turning, and the fear that the other had heard her curt dismissal of the florist showed in the quick shifting of her look. When she spoke again, her voice was all gentleness. "Yes, my dear ...
— Apron-Strings • Eleanor Gates
... they lingered, watching the busy scene with its shifting figures. Then they stepped into the elevator and were shot up to the street level. The hands of the clock stood at eleven when at last ...
— Paul and the Printing Press • Sara Ware Bassett
... concentrated my thoughts on Venice; I stimulated my imagination with poetic memories, and strove to feel myself present in Venice, as I had felt myself present in Prague. But in vain. I was only colouring the Canaletto engravings that hung in my old bedroom at home; the picture was a shifting one, my mind wandering uncertainly in search of more vivid images; I could see no accident of form or shadow without conscious labour after the necessary conditions. It was all prosaic effort, not rapt passivity, such as I ...
— The Lifted Veil • George Eliot
... apologist and expositor a hundred years later, the great Burke, as above all things a revolution within the pale of the law or the constitution. They represented the philosophic adjustment of popular ideas to the political changes wrought by shifting circumstances, as distinguished from the biblical or Hebraic method of adjusting such ideas, which had prevailed in the ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley


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