Ballroom

How to spell ballroom

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce ballroom

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does ballroom mean?

1. nounA large room used for formal dances and social functions.

Ballroom in a sentence

• The hotel cleared its largest ballroom for the wedding reception.

• Chandeliers hung above the polished floor of the grand ballroom.

Where does ballroom come from?

Language of origin: French

This is a transparent English compound joining 'ball' and 'room', but the two halves come from very different places. 'Ball' in the sense of a grand dance arrived through French 'bal', which came from the Late Latin verb 'ballare', meaning 'to dance', itself borrowed from the Greek 'ballizein', 'to dance or jump about'. That dancing 'ball' is unrelated to the round 'ball' you throw, which descends instead from an Old Norse and Germanic word for a rounded object, so the spelling collision is a pure coincidence. 'Room' is a thoroughly native word from Old English 'rum', meaning 'space' or 'extent', and it kept its sense of an enclosed space within a building. The compound 'ballroom' came together in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as grand houses set aside a large hall purely for dancing, and the double 'l' followed by the double 'o' is the only thing worth pausing over when you write it.

How the word is built

• ball (a formal dance gathering)
• room (a space within a building)