Charleston

How to spell charleston

10 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce charleston

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does charleston mean?

1. nounA lively 1920s ballroom dance characterised by fast kicks and swivelling knees, danced to ragtime jazz.

Charleston in a sentence

• The dance teacher demonstrated the charleston to a crowd of curious beginners.

• Every wedding reception that year seemed to end with a wild charleston on the floor.

Where does charleston come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The charleston takes its name directly from the city of Charleston in South Carolina, in the United States, where the rhythmic style that powered the dance grew out of African American communities along the southern coast. The city itself was named in honour of King Charles II of England, so the root is the man's name Charles, from the Germanic Karl meaning 'free man' or simply 'man'. The dance burst into national popularity after it featured in the 1923 Broadway show 'Runnin' Wild', set to a song called 'The Charleston', and within a couple of years it had become the defining craze of the Jazz Age. Because the word is just a place name pressed into service, its spelling preserves the unstressed middle of 'Charles' plus '-ton', the common English place-name ending meaning 'town' or 'settlement'. The quiet trap for writers is that the second syllable is barely sounded, so the 'le' in 'Charles' is easy to drop.

How the word is built

• Charleston (place name: city in South Carolina) used as a common noun; no internal prefix or suffix