Badminton

How to spell badminton

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce badminton

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does badminton mean?

1. nounA racket sport in which players hit a light shuttlecock back and forth over a high net.

Badminton in a sentence

• The leisure centre runs a badminton league every Tuesday evening.

• He packed two rackets and a shuttlecock for a quick game of badminton in the garden.

Where does badminton come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Badminton takes its name from Badminton House, the country estate of the Duke of Beaufort in Gloucestershire, England, where the game became fashionable among guests in the mid 1800s. The place name itself is much older, recorded in early forms as something like Badimyncgtun, and it broke down into an Anglo-Saxon personal name plus the Old English word tun, meaning an enclosure, farmstead, or settlement (the same element that survives in countless English town names and in the word 'town' itself). The sport, an offshoot of older battledore-and-shuttlecock games, had been played in India by British officers, but it acquired the Badminton label after demonstrations at the house, and by the 1870s the name was firmly attached to the modern net-and-racket game. So the spelling preserves a piece of English geography: the doubled letters and the -ton ending come straight from the estate, not from any description of the sport. Remembering that it is named after a real house helps fix the 'min-ton' ending, which writers sometimes mangle.

How the word is built

• Badminton (English place name)
• -ton (from Old English tun: enclosure, settlement)