Bummer

How to spell bummer

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce bummer

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does bummer mean?

1. nounAn annoying or disappointing situation or piece of news.

Bummer in a sentence

• Missing the last train home was a real bummer.

• It was a bummer when the concert got cancelled an hour before doors.

Where does bummer come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Bummer grew out of the American slang noun 'bum', meaning a loafer or idle wanderer, which most scholars trace to the German 'Bummler', an idler, and the verb 'bummeln', 'to stroll about or waste time'. German immigrants brought the word into American English in the middle of the 1800s, and during the Civil War a 'bummer' was a soldier who straggled and foraged off the land. The sense slowly softened from a person to an experience, and by the 1960s counterculture 'bummer' had become casual slang for a bad trip or any depressing turn of events. The spelling keeps the doubled 'm' because the short, stressed vowel in 'bum' needs the extra consonant before the '-er' ending, a pattern English uses to stop the vowel sounding long. That doubling is the only real spelling decision the word asks of you.

How the word is built

• bum (loafer/loaf about)
• -er (agent/noun suffix)