verto

Verto, vertere, verti, versum, third conjugation. The passive often works as a middle rather than a true passive, so vertitur is usually "it turns" and not "it is turned", and reading it as a passive puts an agent into the sentence who was never there. Terga vertere, "to turn the backs", is the fixed idiom for running away, and in fugam vertere is what you do to the other side.

The supine stem versum is one of the most productive things Latin lent English: version, reverse, converse, adverse, universe, divorce, and verse itself, the line of writing that turns at the end like a plough at the headland. Note that medieval prose reserves converto for religious conversion, so a bare verto in this corpus normally stays physical or textual.