Other forms: swifts
Swift means fast, and fast without delay. A swift kick, a swift reply to the email, a swift half in the pub before the train goes.
It leans a little formal and a little written: reports promise swift action and newspapers describe a swift response, while your friend just says quick. The adverb is swiftly and the noun swiftness. A swift is also a bird, dark and scythe-winged, screaming in circles over rooftops on summer evenings, and named for exactly the reason you would guess. It barely touches the ground, since swifts eat, sleep and mate in the air. Keep it apart from the swallow, which has a forked tail and does perch on wires.
1adjectiveswiftHappening or moving quickly and without delay.
“The rescue team made a swift search of the field.”
synonyms: quick, rapid, prompt
2nounsmallA small dark bird with long curved wings that spends almost its whole life in flight.
“The swifts came back to the church tower in May.”
Also accepted in games: quick, rapid
Swift is Old English swift, from Proto-Germanic *swiftaz, both of them meaning quick. Further back is a Proto-Indo-European root *(s)weyp-, 'to twist, wind around', which is also the family behind swivel, so the oldest picture in the word is sweeping, turning motion rather than a straight sprint. Watch a swift carve over a rooftop and the ancestor makes sense.
Old English
swift
Middle English
swift
English, today
swift
From Middle English swift, from Old English swift. From Middle English swift, from Old English swift (“swift; quick”), from Proto-Germanic swiftaz (“swift; quick”), from Proto-Indo-European (s)weyp- (“to twist; wind around”). Cognate with Icelandic svipta (“to pull quickly”), Old English swīfan (“to revolve, sweep, wend, intervene”). More at swivel.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in Sharper Adjectives, Birds