TITLE: Verb form of 'homotopy'?  'Homotope'?
QUESTION [10 upvotes]: Is there a transitive verb, in common use, which means 'deform via a homotopy'?  I used to think 'homotope' was the answer, but it produces surprisingly few relevant matches on Google, so now I have my doubts.  I want to be able to say things like "By Lemma 17 we can homotope the k-cells (rel boundary) into the subspace Y".  I am well aware that I could rearrange the sentence to say something like "...there is a homotopy such that...", but that's not what I want to do.  I want a simple, one-word verb with this meaning.  I suppose 'deform' might work, but it's not as specific as I would like.
Another form of this question: Does the use of 'homotope' in the sample sentence of the previous paragraph sound strange?  Sound standard and idiomatic?

REPLY [8 votes]: Since all of the responses thus far have been in the form of comments rather than answers, I'll summarize the results in this answer.
Of the first seven people to comment, all thought that "homotope" was a bit informal.  Four commenters thought it was fine to use in print, while three thought it should be avoided in formal papers.
I did a full-text arXiv search, and found 408 occurrences of "homotoped" and 362 occurrences of "homotope".  (I looked at only the mathematics sections, not physics etc.)