swat

Meanings

1. 1
   verb

   to hit or crush something with a quick, sharp blow, often with the hand or an object

   He swatted the fly with a newspaper.

2. 2
   verb

   to make a hoax emergency call so that a SWAT team is dispatched to a victim's address

   The streamer was a victim of swatting during a live broadcast.

A dialectal variant of squat/swot, from Proto-Germanic; via Old and Middle English forms meaning 'to strike, hit', into Modern English swat ('to hit with a sharp blow').

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