Balloon

How to spell balloon

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce balloon

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does balloon mean?

1. nounA flexible bag inflated with air or gas, used as a toy, decoration, or aircraft.
2. verbTo swell out or increase rapidly in size or amount.

Balloon in a sentence

• noun

  The child cried when the red balloon drifted out of reach.

• verb

  The project costs began to balloon once delays set in.

• noun

  Each balloon at the party was tied with curling ribbon.

• verb

  Unpaid interest can balloon a small debt into a crisis.

Where does balloon come from?

Language of origin: Italian

Balloon comes from the Italian ballone or pallone, meaning 'large ball', formed from palla 'ball' plus the augmentative ending -one that signals great size. English borrowed it in the late 1500s, partly by way of the French ballon, originally to describe a large inflated ball used in games. When the Montgolfier brothers launched their hot-air craft in France in 1783, the word was promptly applied to the new flying device, and the inflatable rubber toy sense followed in the nineteenth century. The spelling trap lives in the two doubled letters: the double l carried over from the 'ball' root and the double o that anglicised the Italian -one ending. Remembering that a balloon is simply a big 'ball' helps fix that first pair of l's in place.

How the word is built

• ball- (ball, round object)
• -oon (augmentative suffix from Italian -one, meaning 'large')