pivot

Meanings

Noun

• A thing on which something turns; specifically a metal pointed pin or short shaft in machinery, such as the end of an axle or spindle.
• Something or someone having a paramount significance in a certain situation.
• Act of turning on one foot.
• The officer or soldier who simply turns in his place while the company or line moves around him in wheeling.
• A player with responsibility for co-ordinating their team in a particular jam.
• An element of a set to be sorted that is chosen as a midpoint, so as to divide the other elements into two groups to be dealt with recursively.
• A pivot table.
• Any of a row of captioned elements used to navigate to subpages, rather like tabs.
• An element of a matrix that is used as a focus for row operations, such as dividing the row by the pivot, or adding multiples of the row to other rows making all other values in the pivot column 0.
• A quarterback.
• A circle runner.
• A shift during a general election in a political candidate's messaging to reflect plans and values more moderate than those advocated during the primary.

Verb

• To turn on an exact spot.
• To make a sudden or swift change in strategy, policy, etc.

Origin

• Borrowed from French pivot, from Old French pivot ("hinge pin, pivot, penis") (12 c.), of unknown origin.