bolt
Other forms: bolted; bolts; bolting
We love words that sound like what they mean, and bolt is no exception. It's a quick, sharp word that either means to move quickly or refers to a stroke of lightning, as in "lightning bolt."
The god Zeus was fond of tossing bolts of lightning down upon mortals who angered him. If you were one of those mortals, you'd have been smart to bolt inside as soon as the rain began. To bolt is to run as quickly as you can. Racehorses are often described as bolting out of the gate. Other uses of bolt include the lock in your door, the act of locking that lock, and what a dog does when it gulps down his food.
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a screw that screws into a nut to form a fastenertypes:carriage bolta roundheaded bolt for timber; threaded along part of the shank; inserted into holes already drilledexpansion bolta bolt that has an attachment that expands as the bolt is driven into a surfacemachine bolta bolt with a square or hexagonal head on one end and a threaded shaft on the other end; tightened with a wrench; used to connect metal partsstove bolta small machine bolttype of:screwa fastener with a tapered threaded shank and a slotted head
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the part of a lock that is engaged or withdrawn with a key
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a sliding bar in a breech-loading firearm that ejects an empty cartridge and replaces it and closes the breechtype of:bara rigid piece of metal or wood; usually used as a fastening or obstruction or weapon
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secure or lock with a bolt
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a discharge of lightning accompanied by thundersynonyms: bolt of lightning, thunderbolttype of:lightningabrupt electric discharge from cloud to cloud or from cloud to earth accompanied by the emission of light
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move or jump suddenly“She bolted from her seat”type of:movemove so as to change position, perform a nontranslational motion
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leave suddenly and as if in a hurry
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run away; usually includes taking something or somebody alongtypes:levantrun off without paying a debttype of:
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eat hastily without proper chewing
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swallow hastily
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the act of moving with great haste
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a sudden abandonment (as from a political party)
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a roll of cloth or wallpaper of a definite lengthtype of:rollanything rolled up in cylindrical form
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make or roll into bolts
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in a rigid manner
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directly
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Vocabulary lists containing bolt
The top 1,000 vocabulary words have been carefully chosen to represent difficult but common words that appear in everyday academic and business writing. These words are also the most likely to appear on the SAT, ACT, GRE, and ToEFL. To create this list, we started with the words that give our users the most trouble and then ranked them by how frequently they appear in our corpus of billions of words from edited sources. If you only have time to study one list of words, this is the list.
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