sweep

The word is clipped from chimney sweep: the worker is named after the job. Soot made the sweep a byword for blackness, and the simile black as a sweep stays in use. In a 1961 article on French steam locomotives, the railwayman writing as Balmore describes a French driver as "black as a sweep even before we left Calais."

The object is the expanse being scanned, such as the heavens, the sea or a whole room, and with introduces the instrument: one sweeps the heavens with a telescope. Unlike the methodical search, the stress falls on covering the whole field rather than on finding something. In qntm's There Is No Antimemetics Division, a character sweeps the whole room, checks behind his back and finds nothing.

Trailing fabric is where this light touch feels most at home. Dryden in 1700 has a jeweled train that "swept the plain," and Agatha Christie, recalling old fashions in An Autobiography (1977), describes skirts that sweep the ground. The object is the surface being touched. Unlike the broom-and-brush meaning, nothing is cleared away; the contact is simply light and continuous.

The long stroke can also make music. In his "Ode for Musick on St. Cecilia's Day," Alexander Pope calls on the Muses to "wake into voice each silent string, / And sweep the sounding lyre." Because the stroke crosses many strings at once, the verb suits an instrument played in broad, ringing passes rather than note by note. It is a lofty, literary way of saying "play."

Pride is what this use adds to the motion. Shakespeare's The First Part of Henry the Sixt gives it an emblem: "like a peacock sweep along his tail." The thing carried trails behind, such as a tail, a train or a cape, and along often follows the verb. The dragging motion came first and the swagger grew from it, so the plain and proud uses shade into each other.

Writers use it for land seen as one unbroken stretch, often with a measurement attached. In George B. Schaller's Wildlife of the Tibetan Steppe (1998), the Himalaya guards the plateau "in one continuous sweep of 2250 km." Continuous, long and vast suit it well. The pattern a sweep of plus land or distance is the one to copy.

Here the noun names a fixed shape rather than a movement, and it often goes with make. Walter Scott's Guy Mannering (1815) has "the road which makes a small sweep." An adjective usually says how wide or gentle the bend is: small, long, broad. It shares its outline with the compass of a motion, but this sweep stays fixed in a road, an arch or a staircase.

The usual pattern is the sweep of followed by the thing that moves: the sweep of a door, the sweep of the eye. What it measures is the whole area a motion can cover, such as the floor a door clears as it swings or everything the eye takes in from one spot. It is the noun to reach for when the reach matters more than any single stroke.

The word fits the move. The attacking leg travels in a low arc, much like the arc-shaped motion, and takes the opponent's legs out from under them. What sets a sweep apart from other throws and takedowns is that the legs do most of the work, attacking legs rather than the body or the arms.

Aviation treats sweep as a measurable quantity, counted in degrees: the MiG-17's inner wing has 45 degrees of sweep. Used this way, the noun is uncountable, as in degrees of sweep, more sweep or wing sweep. The past form supplies the adjective for wings built this way: swept wings. Backward sweep is the norm, and forward sweep is the occasional exception.

Even the greatest batsmen could get the shot wrong. In one recorded moment, Bradman attempted a sweep but top-edged the ball to the wicket keeper, because a bat swung flat across the line leaves little margin for error. The noun pairs naturally with attempt, play and try. For the one-word verb that grew from it, see playing the shot.

Cricket has turned the name of a shot into a verb. A batsman who plays the kneeling cross-bat shot is said simply to sweep, and the verb needs no object: he sweeps, she chose to sweep. The longer phrase, play a sweep shot, lives alongside the one-word form. The shot's technique and its risks belong to the noun. The verb is the everyday shorthand for playing it.

Curling takes the broom literally. The brushing happens ahead of a stone that is already moving, and it works against the very motion the game is named for: a swept stone curls less. The household act of cleaning with a broom becomes a way of steering something players can no longer touch, adjusting both distance and line after the throw.

This is a rare singular, because the US television term is normally plural-only: the sweeps are the periods, several times a year, when Nielsen ratings measure viewership. The singular appears when one particular period is meant, as in Hugh Malcolm Beville's Audience Ratings (1988), which mentions "the normal November sweep." Do not confuse this sweeps with the ordinary plural noun or the verb form.

This is a regional usage of western Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana, where to sweep the rug can mean running the vacuum over it. Elsewhere the verb points to a broom, so a visitor asked to sweep the carpet may reach for the wrong tool. Within the region, the word names the job of cleaning a floor covering, whatever machine does it.

In this naval sense, the water is the object, not the mine: crews sweep a channel, a strait or a bay. The verb sits easily in the passive and can be counted by passes, as in "the channel was swept twice before the battlefleet proceeded through it." A swept channel is one made safe to cross, so the broom's promise of a clean surface carries over onto open water.