transport etymology 10 - shuttle

Roco's HO-scale model of the ÖBB (Austrian Federal Railways) CityShuttle push-pull trains (a locomotive is attached to one end).  The use of English words and phrases has become an obsession in brand marketing in Europe.

In Icelandic the word skutul means a harpoon and that gives the origin, too, of the English word shuttle: the Old English precursor scytel meant an arrow or a dart, which in turn came from the prehistoric-Germanic base *skaut-, *skeut-, *skut- which also produced English shoot and shut. There is a gap between the disappearance of Old English scytel and the emergence of shuttle in the 14th century, but they are probably the same word: a shuttle being something that is thrown or ‘shot’ across a loom.  (In some other languages, the machine takes its name from its resemblance to a boat: Latin navicula, French navette, German weberschiff).

The usage in the sense of "a train that runs back and forth" is first recorded in 1895, from an image of the weaver's instrument's back-and-forth movement over the warp; extended to aircraft in 1942 and to spacecraft in 1969.