reverses

1. 1
   verb

   Third-person singular simple present of reverse.

   The appeals court reverses any verdict it finds unsupported by the evidence.

   The tidal current reverses direction roughly twice a day.

   Note

   Nearly everything this verb form does, it does to an object. A court reverses a verdict, a current reverses direction, and someone reverses an order, a sequence or a garment turned inside out. Two older uses have dropped away. One took no object and meant "comes back." The other meant "turns away" or "sends off." Both are obsolete, so a modern reader meets them only in old texts.

2. 2
   noun

   Plural of reverse.

   The collector examined the reverses of each medal under a bright lamp.

   The army recovered quickly from its early reverses in the campaign.

   Note

   One spelling does two jobs: reverses is also the present-tense verb, so the army's reverses are its setbacks, while the army reverses is undoing or turning something around. As a plural noun it serves every countable meaning of reverse: the back faces of coins and medals, misfortunes, opposites and backward movements. In the setback meaning it often takes a qualifier, as in early reverses.

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