Championship

How to spell championship

12 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce championship

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does championship mean?

1. nounA competition to decide the overall winner, or the title and status of being that winner.

Championship in a sentence

• The team trained for months to reach the national championship.

• She defended her championship for a third consecutive year.

Where does championship come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word joins two parts of very different origin. The first, champion, traces back to the Late Latin campio, meaning a fighter or gladiator, which itself grew from the Latin campus, meaning an open field; the field in question was the place where battles and contests were fought. English took champion through Old French in the 1200s, where it described someone who fought on another person's behalf in a formal combat. The ending -ship is a thoroughly native English suffix, descended from Old English -scipe, which marked a state, condition, rank, or skill; it is the same element seen in friendship and hardship. Combined, championship literally names the state or rank of being a champion, and over time it came to mean the contest that decides who that champion is. The buried Latin campus is also why we have words like camp and campus today.

How the word is built

• champion (from Late Latin campio: a fighter)
• -ship (state, rank, or quality)