switchback
English
Etymology
switch + back, originally used to describe zigzag railways.
Noun
switchback (plural switchbacks)
- A zigzag path, road or railway track; especially a railway track in which the train travels in a reverse direction at each switch [from 1860s]
- 2019 April 25, Samanth Subramanian, “Hand dryers v paper towels: the surprisingly dirty fight for the right to dry your hands”, in The Guardian[1]:
- Already, we enter some airport bathrooms through a brief switchback of walls, so that we don’t ever grasp a door handle.
- A hairpin bend.
- (dated, UK) A roller coaster.
Translations
zigzag path
|
Verb
switchback (third-person singular simple present switchbacks, present participle switchbacking, simple past and past participle switchbacked)
- (of a path etc) To zigzag.
- Synonym: zigzag
- 2015 June 25, John Henderson, “A secret range of stunning mountains? Hikers, meet Slovakia's High Tatras”, in LA Times[2]:
- I climbed 6,683-foot Velka Svistovka, not the highest mountain in the Tatras but arguably the one with the best view. I started from Zelene pleso chata (pleso means "lake" and chata means "hut" in Slovak), and right after turning the first corner I started switchbacking.
See also
Further reading
- switchback on Wikipedia.Wikipedia