alternate
Verbalternates, alternating, alternated
Noun pluralalternates
Often confused with alternative
Formsalternates, alternating, alternated
Pluralalternates
- 1To happen or act by turns, each following the other in time or place; used with "with".
In his schedule, weeks of intense work alternate with long stretches of rest.
On the old facade, rows of brick alternated with bands of pale stone.
- 2To do or arrange things by turns, making them follow one another in a regular, repeated order.
Alternate the pasta and the sauce in layers until the dish is full.
The physical therapist alternated heat and ice on her injured knee.
Similarrotate
Note
Here someone does the alternating, and the two things are its object, joined by and: Nehemiah Grew's Cosmologia Sacra (1701) has God alternating "the disposition of good and evil." When the things take turns on their own, English drops the object and uses the intransitive "alternate with"; when one thing swings back and forth between states, it uses "alternate between".
- 3Serving as another possible choice; other than the usual or original one.
Officials posted signs directing drivers to an alternate route around the closed bridge.
Comic book writers love stories set in an alternate universe where the hero turned bad.
Similaralternative, backup, different
Note
American English lets alternate do the work of alternative: an alternate route, an alternate universe, links shown in an alternate color. Outside the US, alternative is the safer word for another option. The two meanings can collide, because beside the "every other" meaning on alternate days reads as every other day, not as a different set of days.
- 4Being every other or every second member of a series, falling regularly between the members of another series, as the odd or the even numbers do.
Shading alternate squares of the grid produces a checkerboard pattern.
In the sequence 2, 5, 8, 11, 14, the alternate terms 2, 8, and 14 form a sequence of their own.
Note
In a series, alternate picks members by place, not by value. Take alternate terms of 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 from the start and you get 10, 30 and 50, every one even, yet they stand first, third and fifth. Begin at the second term and the other set falls out; counted from one, the odd numbers 1, 3, 5, 7 are the alternate members.
- 5Happening or coming by turns, first one and then the other, in repeated succession of time or place.
The two nurses cover alternate night shifts, so one of them is always on the ward.
The cathedral's arches are built of alternate bands of red and white stone.
Note
The sense closest to the Latin: alternus meant "one after another, by turns," built on alter, "other." Pope bids "alternate passions fall and rise" in An Essay on Criticism (1711), and the word still sits before plural nouns, as in alternate shifts. It is not comparable: things take turns or they do not, so English has no more alternate.
- 6A substitute or alternative, especially one chosen beforehand to take another's place in some duty if the need arises.
The convention seated an alternate when one of the state's delegates fell ill.
The judge excused a juror and called in the first of the two alternates.
Similarsubstitute, replacement, stand-in, backup
Note
This noun is American, like the adjective meaning "other", and it usually names a person kept in reserve: the delegate seated when another falls ill, the juror called when one is excused. It can name a thing too: in Bungie's Halo 3 (2007), Cortana finds the corridors collapsed and goes "looking for an alternate," another way through.
- 7
- 8A replacement that is worth as much as the original or more, or that works as well or better.
If the advertised prize is unavailable, the winner will receive an alternate worth at least as much.
The engineer approved the contractor's alternate, a sturdier valve that cost no more than the one specified.
Similarreplacement, substitute, equivalent, alternative
Note
Where the stand-in sense is about readiness, this one is about worth: offering an alternate here promises that nothing is lost in the swap, since it must match or beat the original in value or in what it does. Like the stand-in, it is American usage.
- 9Of leaves, growing singly at different heights on the stem, with each one set at the same angle around the stem from the one before.
Field guides tell maples, with their paired leaves, from oaks, whose leaves are alternate.
The seedling's alternate leaf arrangement became clear once it had put out a few more leaves.
Oppositeopposite
Note
Botanists sort leaves on a stem into a handful of patterns, and this is the one-at-a-time pattern. Because each leaf turns through the same angle from the last, the leaves often trace a spiral up the stem; opposite leaves, by contrast, come in pairs at a single node, as on maples. Birch, oak and mulberry show the alternate pattern.
- 10Something that takes turns with something else; a change from one state or fortune to another.
Grateful alternates of substantial peace.
1718, Mat[thew] Prior, “Solomon on the Vanity of the World. A Poem in Three Books.”
Less common meanings
- 11In heraldry, said of a pair of tinctures that color a charge in turns, or that are counterchanged against the field.
The arms show a shield divided red and silver, with an eagle of alternate colors set across the line.
The design calls for a lion in alternate tinctures, gold on the blue half and blue on the gold.
Note
A charge laid across the line of a two-tinctured shield can take the opposite tincture on each side, so it never vanishes into either half; heralds call this counterchanged. In a blazon the word follows the charge: The Jewish Encyclopedia (1925) describes the Goldschmidt arms, party argent and gules, with "an eagle of alternate colors."
- 12In mathematics, a proportion obtained from another proportion by interchanging its means.
Taking the alternate of a:b = c:d gives a:c = b:d, which holds whenever the original does.
The next exercise asks students to write the alternate of each proportion and check that it is still true.
Note
The term belongs to the arithmetic of proportions. In a:b = c:d the inner terms, b and c, are the means and the outer two the extremes; trade the means and you get a:c = b:d. The new proportion holds whenever the first does, because the product of the means still equals the product of the extremes.
- 13In geometry, to perform an alternation on a polytope or tessellation, removing every other vertex; also, to remove vertices from a face or edge as part of an alternation.
Geometers alternate the cube to obtain a regular tetrahedron inscribed in it.
When the hexagonal faces are alternated, each one becomes a triangle.
Note
A geometer's operation built on the "every other" meaning: keep every other vertex, join the survivors, and an even-sided face returns with half its sides, so an octagon becomes a square. A square keeps only two opposite corners, which bound nothing, and square faces disappear. Coxeter put it plainly in The densities of the regular polytopes (1932): "the alternated square is nothing."
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Practice
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Origin
Borrowed from Latin alternātus, the perfect passive participle of alternō ("to take turns"), from alternus ("one after another, by turns"), from alter ("other") + -nus. It is a doublet of altern; see also alter.