belt

Most often followed by out: you belt out a song, an anthem, a chorus. The particle can drop when the object is a particular song, as when Céline Dion belted "My Heart Will Go On" at the 2017 Billboard Music Awards. The verb is informal and covers shouting as well as singing. Said of a singer, it usually points to the chest-voice technique.

Voice teachers treat belt as a mode as well as a sound. A singer can sing in belt, or break out of her soprano into a belt, as Norman Spivey and Mary Saunder Barton's Cross-Training in the Voice Studio (2018) puts it. The quality comes from carrying chest voice past the passaggio. Praising someone's strong belt means praising that power. The verb belt out is its everyday cousin.

Astronomers borrowed the garment's shape. A swarm of asteroids, comets or icy planetesimals counts as a belt because their similar orbits trace a rough ring around the star, often hemmed in between larger planets or lying beyond them. The word usually travels in compounds: asteroid belt, debris belt. Keep it distinct from the cloud bands on Jupiter, which wrap one planet's surface rather than circling a star.

Baseball's verb for power: a batter belts a pitch, a fastball, a ball over the grandstand. It stresses distance and force rather than mere contact, which is why it so often ends in a home run. It is the sporting specialization of the colloquial verb for hitting, narrowed from striking anything to sending a pitched ball a long way.

Geologists use it for long, continuous structures traced across or beneath a landscape: a mountain belt, an ore belt, a fold and thrust belt. It nearly always takes a modifier saying what the structure is made of or how it formed. Belts can also nest. B. C. Burchfiel in 1980 describes fold and thrust belts forming the outer margin of a larger orogenic belt.

Umpires and commentators use the batter's waistline as a landmark for the middle of the strike zone. The word almost always comes with at: a pitch at the belt, a strike at the belt. It works as a location, not an object, so it rarely takes a or appears in the plural.

A gunner's term for the strip that carries rounds into an automatic weapon in a continuous run. It gives English the compound belt-fed, used of machine guns loaded this way. A belt is fed into the gun and emptied as it fires, and spent belts are cast aside. That flexibility sets it apart from a rigid box of cartridges.

Naval architecture's name for the strip of heavy plating that runs along a warship's hull near the waterline. It is described by its thickness, as in a twelve-inch belt, and is often called the armor belt. The word fits because the plating girdles the hull as a belt girdles a waist, guarding the magazines and engines behind it.

Telescope language for the darker stripes on Jupiter and Saturn, which alternate with lighter zones. Belts and zones are paired when describing the face of either planet. Unlike a belt of asteroids, nothing here orbits on its own: the band is cloud, part of the planet itself. That is why it is spoken of as Jupiter's belts.