Shift Work ʃɪft Dramatic Night I Public Sense

• a dramatic shift in public opinion
• a shift of emphasis
• to be on the day/night shift at the factory
• to work an eight-hour shift

shift

1. a change in position or direction
• see also paradigm shift
  https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/paradigm-shift
• a dramatic shift in public opinion
• a shift of emphasis
2. a period of time worked by a group of workers who start work as another group finishes
• see also swing shift
  https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/swing-shift
• to be on the day/night shift at the factory
• to work an eight-hour shift
• working in shifts
• shift workers/work
3. the workers who work a particular shift
• The night shift has/have just come off duty.
4. the system on a computer keyboard or typewriter that allows capital letters or a different set of characters to be typed; the key that operates this system
5. a woman’s simple straight dress
6. a simple straight piece of clothing worn by women in the past as underwear

Extra Examples

• He works the night shift.
• I agreed to work double shifts for a few weeks.
• I detected a subtle shift towards our point of view.
• I didn’t realize that I’d have to work shifts.
• I’m doing the early shift this week.
• It was 8 a.m. and the nurses were changing shifts.
• My husband changed his shifts from afternoons to nights.
• My husband has changed his shifts, from the afternoon shift to the night one.
• The clinic is staffed by ten doctors who work in shifts.
• The industry has undergone a fundamental shift in recent years.
• The moment marked a significant shift in attitudes to the war.
• The shift change took place at 10 p.m.
• There has been a major shift in the public’s taste.
• These climate shifts occurred over less than a decade.
• These proposals represent a dramatic shift in policy.
• They’d altered his shift pattern twice in the past fortnight.
• a decision for the chief nurse on each shift
• a shift in attitude/opinion/perspective
• a shift in direction/focus/policy/strategy
• a shift in emphasis/mood/tone
• a shift towards part-time farming
• a sudden shift to the right in British politics
• one factor which may explain the president’s policy shift
• the many shifts between verse and prose that occur in Shakespeare
• the shift away from direct taxation
• As I left the next shift was settling in for the day.
• Most of the night shift had already left.
• The drama began at 5.15 am as the day shift was going on duty.
• There was a gradual shift in the population away from the countryside to the towns.
• These results mark a dramatic shift in public opinion.

Word Origin

• Old English sciftan ‘arrange, divide, share’, of Germanic origin; related to German schichten ‘to layer’. A common Middle English sense ‘change, replace’ gave rise to the noun senses (5) and (6) (via the sense of ‘changing one's clothes’) and senses (2) and (3) (via the sense of ‘relays of workers’).