Gauntlet

How to spell gauntlet

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce gauntlet

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does gauntlet mean?

1. nounA protective glove, especially the armoured glove of a suit of plate, or a sturdy glove with a long cuff.
2. nounA challenging or punishing series of obstacles or critics one must pass through, as in the phrase 'run the gauntlet'.

Gauntlet in a sentence

• The knight raised his steel gauntlet in salute before the joust.

• New managers must run the gauntlet of probing questions from the board.

• She pulled on a thick leather gauntlet before handling the falcon.

• Reporters formed a gauntlet of cameras outside the courthouse.

Where does gauntlet come from?

Language of origin: French

The glove sense comes from the Old French gantelet, a diminutive of gant meaning 'glove', which the French had borrowed from a Germanic source related to the idea of a protective covering for the hand. English picked it up in the 1400s for the armoured glove worn with a suit of plate, and the dramatic gesture of 'throwing down the gauntlet' as a formal challenge to combat preserves that medieval flavour. The quite separate sense found in 'run the gauntlet' has a tangled history: it began as gantlope, taken in the 1600s from the Swedish gatlopp, formed from gata 'lane' and lopp 'a running course', describing a military punishment in which an offender ran between two rows of soldiers who struck him. Because gantlope sounded so close to the familiar glove word, English speakers reshaped it into gauntlet, and the two merged in spelling. That accidental collision is exactly why the 'au' spelling traps writers, since the ordeal sense never originally had anything to do with a glove.

How the word is built

• gant- (from Old French gant: glove, of Germanic origin)
• -let (diminutive suffix)