Other forms: rebooted, rebooting, reboots
To reboot is to turn a computer off and on again so that it starts fresh. The screen goes black, the logo comes back, and half the time whatever was wrong has quietly gone away.
Reboot is a noun as well — give it a reboot, a quick reboot should sort it. The word has walked well beyond computers: a film or a series gets a reboot when a studio starts the story over with a new cast, which is why Spider-Man has been rebooted more times than anyone can count. People talk about rebooting a career or a town centre, meaning a clean start rather than a repair. Restart is the plain everyday word for the machine sense. Reset is not the same thing at all — a reset puts settings back to how they came from the factory, while a reboot changes nothing but the power.
1verbrebootTo turn a computer or device off and on again so that it starts up fresh.~10%
“Try rebooting the router before you call the engineer.”
synonyms: restart
2nounactAn act of turning a machine off and on again.~10%
“A quick reboot cleared the error.”
3nounnewA new version of a film or series that starts the story again from the beginning.~60%
“The reboot dropped the original cast and began again.”
4verbformTo start something again in a fresh form.~20%
“The council wants to reboot the high street with a weekend market.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 22 sentences found in the wild and placed 20 of them on a sense (2 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Also accepted in games: restart
Middle English
bote
English
boot
English, today
reboot
Built from
From re- + boot. boot comes from Middle English bote. From Middle English boote, bote (“shoe”), from Old French bote (“a high, thick shoe”). Of obscure origin, but probably related to Old French bot (“club-foot”), bot (“fat, short, blunt”), from Old Frankish butt, from Proto-Germanic buttaz, butaz (“cut off, short, numb, blunt”), from Proto-Indo-European bʰewt-, bʰewd- (“to strike, push, shock”); if so, a a doublet of butt. Compare Old Norse butt (“stump”), Low German butt (“blunt, plump”), Old English bytt (“small piece of land”), buttuc (“end”). More at buttock and debut.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA