Cast (meaning)

'To cast' is a verb with many meanings. (OED lists 83 main meanings, with many subdivisions, grouped into 13 families.) The basic idea is the same as 'to throw', but throw is now the better choice in almost all physical meanings. (While 'cast' may still be used, and understand, it feels more literary, archaic and 'quaint' - except in some contexts where it has become conventional. Some particular uses which may be useful to readers of AWE:

• A fisherman's action in throwing a baited hook, or a note, etc, into the water is called casting. Some items of boats' equipment, like 'anchors', may also be cast; and before a ship can leave the place where she is tied up, she must 'cast off her mooring ropes'.
• To cast aside is to throw away, or discard.
• One can cast a 'vote (i.e. 'vote for someone'), 'die' ('roll' the dice) or, more generally 'lots ('making a choice by chance').
  • 'To cast one's lot with', on the other hand, means 'to join, and share one's chances with' [some leader, or organisation, etc].
• To cast an eye [or look or glance, etc]' is 'to look' - with 'eye' particularly it can have connotations of courtship, or expressing desire.
• 'To cast light [on]' is 'to illuminate', 'to make clearer'. (This can be both literal and figurative: a searchlight may cast light on a high building, but a new theory can also cast light on a mathematical problem.
• An older sense of cast was to defeat, overthrow, or throw to the ground. This is now only common in some forms of the sport of wrestling, or in its equivalent in handling livestock: 'to bring [an animal] to the ground', or 'to take [an animal] off its feet': but some feeling of it survives in the participial adjective downcast, meaning 'dejected', 'in poor spirits', or 'low in feeling'.
• 'To cast', sometimes 'off', is to 'throw off' or 'to take off' clothes, etc. A horse that casts a shoe has lost the iron horseshoe; a horse that casts its rider is not popular.
• Snakes, etc, cast their skin as part of growth.
• A knitter will begin a new piece by casting on (affixing the wool to the needles) and finish it by casting off.
• Before calculating machines and computers, accounts clerks use to cast accounts (or figures, etc) - to add up a column of entries. Various other similarly obsolete terms can be found in older texts: astrologers would cast horoscopes; doctors would cast water, or diagnose by inspection of the patient's urine.
• A dog that casts about is seeking around in circular patterns, either (in hunting) seeking a scent to follow, or (in working with sheep) getting to a particular position with startling the sheep. Figuratively, students asked a question which they cannot answer may 'cast around for one': that is, 'desperately search in their minds' - as a hound may seek a scent that it has temporarily lost.
• In printing, casting, or casting off, was the skilled job, in the days of setting metal type, of estimating how many printed pagesd would be needed for a particular manuscript.
• In the performing arts, a director casts a play, opera, film etc by distributing the parts among the actors available.
• In metalwork, 'to cast' metal, or any similar material, is to pour it, in its melted state, into a mould from which, when it is cold, a solid item my be taken for finishing.
• Sailors may be cast away, in shipwrecks and so on: that is, be thrown into the water, or eventually floating to solid land.
• An outcasts are people rejected by the society from which they have come.

You may want see some verbs derived from 'to cast': they are listed at cast (irregular verb), which also shows the forms of the verb.