verb

• (transitive) To cause to move (suddenly), as by pushing or shoving; to give a (sudden) start to.
  "For we are all shunting—shunting—shunting / We're all shunting in this queer world of ours. / Nations are shunted like to our railway carriages: / As Napoleon shunted la belle France into war; / Princes are shunted into royal marriages; / Kings and Queens are shunted just like a railway car."
• (transitive) To divert to a less important place, position, or state.
  "Here in England it is, thank God! the custom for us to shunt ourselves off the grand trunk railroad of business, in tearing up and down which our lives are mainly passed, into some quiet siding once every year. […] [W]hen July is running into August, and everything is breaking up, you feel that your business for the season—be it in commerce, law, or literature—is achieved, and that the time for your being temporarily shunted has arrived."
• (transitive) To provide with a shunt.
  "to shunt a galvanometer"
• (transitive, computing) To move data in memory to a physical disk.
  "A momentary power spike had caused a blip, forcing the backup system to shunt Carella's current work into a safety file. It was standard operating procedure, a decision made by the online computer itself."

noun

• (electricity) A connection used as an alternative path between parts of an electrical circuit.
  "The sensibility of a galvanometer may be varied in a very simple manner by the use of what is termed a shunt. A shunt is a resistance coil, or coil of fine wire used to divert some definite portion of a current, taking it past a galvanometer instead of through its coils."
• (firearms) The shifting of the studs on a projectile from the deep to the shallow sides of the grooves in its discharge from a shunt gun.
  "In length, this gun was the same as the French, but weighed 9 cwt. less. It was rifled in six grooves on the shunt plan, in the form in which it has been generally applied to large guns, with the difference that some of the angles of the grooving were rounded off. […] To impede fouling, a slightly greater windage was allowed in the chamber of the shunt gun, the diameter there being 0.04 greater than at the mouth of the bore."
• (medicine, veterinary medicine) An abnormal passage between body channels.
  "Portosystemic shunts can be congenital or acquired with congenital PSS commonly comprising a single communicating vessel between the portal venous circulation and the systemic circulation via the caudal vena cava or azygos vein. Of congenital shunts, 66–75% are extrahepatic. Intrahepatic portosystemic shunts are most commonly identified in larger breeds of dog (though we have also seen a number of terriers with intrahepatic shunts through our clinic)."
• (surgery) A passage between body channels constructed surgically as a bypass; a tube inserted into the body to create such a passage.
  "We present an extremely rare case of delayed and combined ventriculoperitoneal shunt blockage, viscus perforation and migration into the urethra manifested by a repeated urinary tract infection. This was discovered six months after the shunt was inserted."