[
US
/ˈɔɫtɝˌneɪt, ˈɔɫtɝnət/
]
VERB
- exchange people temporarily to fulfill certain jobs and functions
- be an understudy or alternate for a role
-
do something in turns
We take turns on the night shift - go back and forth; swing back and forth between two states or conditions
- reverse (a direction, attitude, or course of action)
NOUN
- someone who takes the place of another person
ADJECTIVE
-
occurring by turns; first one and then the other
alternating feelings of love and hate -
serving or used in place of another
an alternative plan -
of leaves and branches etc; first on one side and then on the other in two ranks along an axis; not paired
stems with alternate leaves -
every second one of a series
the cleaning lady comes on alternate Wednesdays
jam every other day
How To Use alternate In A Sentence
- A couple of phone calls, arranged by a deep-sea diver I came to know while working on a story on the Miskito Coast of Nicaragua, led me to an alternately boastful and paranoidly surreptitious man named Steve. The Lampshade
- This service presents alternate addresses when Internet users mistype a URL. Internet News: Browsers Archives
- They were so beautifully typeset, and their tone was just captivating — alternately casual and buffer-overflowingly technical. Copy What You Like
- A similar problem came up yesterday in reading a Boris Akunin story called Strast' i dolg Passion and duty, set in an alternate Russia which has revived tsardom, along with its Table of Ranks and all the rest of the imperial paraphernalia. Languagehat.com: TRANSLATION PROBLEMS.
- With words like "nite" and "lite" having achieved semi-acceptable status as at least "alternate spellings," I suppose it's only a matter of time before "u" become official. Archive 2007-03-01
- Similarly, a study of Tunisian women in Morocco showed that older women categorically use diphthongs /aw/and/aj /, while middle-aged women alternate between diphthongs and monophthongs.
- Thus natural science will be subalternate to mathematics, for even though mathematics is not the science of the higher form, of light, considered in itself, it does govern the way in which light realizes itself in space. Medieval Theories of Demonstration
- In order for cyclothymia to be diagnosed, hypomanic symptoms and depressive symptoms must be present alternately for at least two years.
- The first uses what AirTight now alternately refers to as a "vulnerability" or a "limitation" in the 802.11 specification: a shared encryption key called the group temporal key (GTK), shared by all clients connected to the same access point, can't detect an address spoofing attempt (the pairwise keys, which are used to scramble data between a given client and the access point, can). AirTight defends Wi-Fi WPA2 'vulnerability' claim
- But Mr. Erwitt also has a gift for clicking off multiple photographs of a single scene, finding and preserving evanescent moments likely to leave the viewer alternately laughing or enrapt. Photo-Op: Head or Tail
