League

How to spell league

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce league

What does league mean?

1. nounA group of people, teams, or states formally united for a shared purpose, such as a sporting competition or a political alliance.
2. nounAn old unit of distance equal to about three miles, now used mainly in historical or literary contexts.

League in a sentence

• The football league announced its fixtures for the new season.

• The old map marked the harbour as roughly one league from the village.

• Several nations formed a league to coordinate their trade policies.

• Sailors once measured a sea league as three nautical miles.

Where does league come from?

Language of origin: French

The 'association' sense of league arrived in English in the fifteenth century from the Old French ligue, which in turn came from the Italian lega and ultimately the Late Latin liga, meaning 'a binding' or 'a tie'. That noun was built on the Latin verb ligare, 'to bind', the same root that gives us 'ligament' and 'oblige', so a league is literally a group of people or states bound together by agreement. The unrelated sense of league as a unit of distance has a quite separate origin in the Late Latin leuga, a word probably of Gaulish (Celtic) origin describing a measure of roughly three miles. Both spellings settled on the same form in English, where the 'gue' ending preserves a hard 'g' sound borrowed from French, much as in 'fatigue' and 'colleague'. That silent French-style 'ue' is exactly the spelling trap, since the word ends with the sound of a plain 'g'.

How the word is built

• From Old French ligue / Late Latin liga (a binding, a tie), based on the root ligare (to bind); the distance sense comes from a separate Late Latin word leuga