Carousel

How to spell carousel

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce carousel

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does carousel mean?

1. nounA revolving fairground ride fitted with model horses or other seats that turn around a central axis.
2. nounA rotating conveyor belt at an airport on which arriving luggage is delivered to passengers.

Carousel in a sentence

• The children begged to ride the painted carousel at the fair.

• We waited at the carousel for nearly an hour before our suitcases appeared.

• A vintage carousel with hand-carved horses stood in the centre of the park.

• Her bag was the last one left circling the carousel.

Where does carousel come from?

Language of origin: Italian

The word came into English in the seventeenth century from the French carrousel, a borrowing of the Italian carosello, which named a kind of tournament in which horsemen rode in formation and played mounted games with rings and lances. The literal sense of the Italian was something like a little contest of horsemanship, and the festive, circling movement of the riders is the thread that connects it to the modern meaning. By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the term had drifted from the elegant equestrian display to the mechanical fairground ride with wooden horses turning round a central pole. In the twentieth century the same idea of things going round and round was applied to the revolving belts that deliver luggage at airports. The exact ancestor of the Italian carosello is uncertain, which is part of why the spelling has never settled into a single fixed form; English happily uses both the single-l carousel and the double-l carrousel. That instability in the original is a useful reminder for the writer: keep one r and one s but, in the standard modern form, a single l before the final e.

How the word is built

• carousel (from Italian carosello, a tournament of horsemen)
• native English spelling with single r, single s, and -el ending