Hockey

How to spell hockey

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce hockey

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does hockey mean?

1. nounA team game in which players use curved sticks to drive a ball or puck into the opposing goal, played on a field or on ice.

Hockey in a sentence

• The children played hockey on the frozen pond all afternoon.

• She bought a new hockey stick before the season started.

Where does hockey come from?

Language of origin: French

The origin of hockey is genuinely uncertain, which is why dictionaries hedge their bets. The most widely accepted suggestion traces it to the Old French word hoquet, meaning a shepherd's crook or hooked staff, a reference to the curved stick used to strike the ball. That hooked-stick idea fits the game neatly, since the bend of the blade is its defining feature. The word surfaces in English from around the early sixteenth century, with the modern spelling settling by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as organised forms of the game took shape. The spelling can trip writers because the hard sound in the middle is written with -ck- and the unstressed ending is the deceptive -ey rather than -ie or -y alone.

How the word is built

• hock- (probably from Old French hoquet, a hooked shepherd's crook)
• -ey (noun ending)