Other forms: casts, casting, cast
To cast is to throw — with aim, and with a certain swing to it. You cast a fishing line out across the water and watch where it drops. You cast a stone into a pond and count the rings.
Most of what you cast is not solid. A tree casts a shadow, a lamp casts light along the ceiling, you cast a glance at the clock and cast your vote at an election, and one rumour casts doubt over a whole company. As a noun, a cast is the shell of hard white plaster round a broken arm, and it is also the copy that comes out of a mould — the dinosaur skeleton in the museum is a cast, not the bones. Then there is the cast of a film, meaning all the actors together, and to cast a play is to choose them. One thing to watch: the past tense is cast, never casted. He cast the net yesterday.
1verbcastTo throw something out and away from you, aiming it.~6%
“He cast the line out over the water and sat down.”
2verbsendTo send out something with no weight to it — a shadow, light, a look, a vote, doubt.~19%
“The old wall casts a long shadow across the yard.”
3nounhardA hard shell of plaster round a broken bone, or a copy made by pouring plaster or metal into a mould.~22%
“She wore a cast on her wrist for six weeks.”
4nounactorsAll the actors in a play or a film, taken together.~53%
“The whole cast came out for a second bow.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 180 sentences found in the wild and placed 163 of them on a sense (17 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Cast arrived with the Norse: kasta, to throw. It was useful enough to push the old English word for the same job — warp — out of the way and take the work over. That throw is still running inside every broadcast, forecast and podcast: something flung out wide and let go of.
Middle English
casten
English, today
cast
From Middle English casten. From Middle English casten, from Old Norse kasta (“to throw, cast, overturn”), from Proto-Germanic kastōną (“to throw, cast”), of unknown origin. Cognate with Scots cast (“to cast, throw”), Danish kaste (“to throw”), Swedish kasta (“to throw, cast, fling, toss, discard”), Icelandic kasta (“to pitch, toss”). In the sense of "flinging", displaced native warp.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA