start
Definitions
General English
- verb to begin to work
Cars & Driving
- verb to use the starter motor to crank the engine until it fires and runs on its own
Computing
- noun the beginning or first part
Information & Library Science
- noun the place or time at which something begins
- verb to create something from the beginning
Travel
- verb to set a machine going
Politics
- acronym forStrategic Arms Reduction Talks (written as START)
Origin & History of “start”
Start originally meant ‘jump, leap, caper’ (‘Him lust not (he did not like) to play nor start, nor to dance, nor to sing’, Chaucer, Romance of the Rose 1366). this gradually evolved via ‘make a sudden movement’ to ‘begin a journey’, but it did not emerge as a fully-fledged synonym for ‘begin’ until the end of the 18th century. Startle (OE), which came from the same Germanic base *start-, has kept more closely to the notion of ‘sudden movement’.
