- 1
A road, path, or railway that climbs a steep hill by turning back on itself again and again — up a bit, sharp bend, back the other way, sharp bend, up a bit more. Seen from above it looks like a zigzag. Mountain roads are built this way because a straight road up a steep slope would be too steep to drive or walk. In American English this is the everyday word, and it is very common in hiking: "the trail has twelve switchbacks before the top". It works as a verb too — "the road switchbacks up the valley". In British English it has an older second life: a switchback was a ride that ran up and down steep — what we would now call a roller coaster. From that comes the figurative use: "a switchback year", "the switchback of the past few months" — meaning up, down, up, down, with no rest. That figurative use is much more common in Britain than in America. The name comes from railways, where a switch turns a train from one track onto another. A train that could not climb straight up would go forward, stop, be switched, and reverse up the next stretch — switch, back, switch, back.
（山路的）之字形彎道、髮夾彎路；台灣爬山常說「之字坡」「Z字形上坡」。英式英語另指遊樂園的雲霄飛車，並引申為「大起大落」的情況。
組成switch (to turn a train from one track to another) + back (so as to reverse direction and return). Literally: turn, and come back the other way.
同家族的字
- switchthe railway sense of turning onto another track
原始詞典資料6 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，原文照列，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
switchbacknoun/ˈswɪt͡ʃbæk/
- 1
rail-transportrailwaystransportA railway track on a steep slope in a zigzag formation, in which a train travels in a reverse direction at each switch.
- "Of course," said Harry, "there will have to be a branch track built, and a ‘switch-back’ up the hill."
- Marriage was the switchback, the giant racer, the lobster teas, the guarantee that one would never be alone.
- 2
rail-transportrailwaystransportA railway track on which there are steep ascents and descents, a train moving partially or fully by the force of gravity using the momentum generated when descending to travel up an ascending part of the track; especially (UK, dated), such a track built for fun rides at an amusement park; a type of rollercoaster.
- The WR faction claims that the Westbury route is better adapted to high speed, to which advocates of the SR route are apt to retort that the effect of modern diesel traction on schedules over the Salisbury–Exeter switchback has yet to be measured (the speed potential between Waterloo and Salisbury is scarcely disputable) […]
- 3
aeronauticsaerospaceaviationA flight path consisting of a series of steep ascents and descents, generally flown as a stunt.
- 4
A path or road having a series of steep ascents and descents.
- The switchback road to Diabaig - pronounced 'Jer-vague' - passes through some of the most exhilarating scenery in Scotland. […] With a final swoop, the road plummets down into Diabaig, where cottages are dotted across the slopes of a rocky semi-circle.
- 5
roadtransportA sharp bend in a path or road which causes a traveller to almost reverse their direction of travel, especially one of a series of such bends on an incline; a hairpin bend; also a path or road having such a series of bends.
- Already, we enter some airport bathrooms through a brief switchback of walls, so that we don’t ever grasp a door handle.
switchbackverb/ˈswɪt͡ʃbæk/
- 1
To take a zigzag course or path.
- I climbed 6,683-foot Velka Svistovka, not the highest mountain in the Tatras but arguably the one with the best view. I started from Zelene pleso chata (pleso means "lake" and chata means "hut" in Slovak), and right after turning the first corner I started switchbacking.
資料來源：英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary（CC BY-SA 4.0）。 原文照列，未經改寫。