Marathon

How to spell marathon

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce marathon

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does marathon mean?

1. nounA long-distance running race, officially 26.2 miles or about 42 kilometres.
2. nounAny long, demanding activity requiring sustained endurance or concentration.

Marathon in a sentence

• She trained for six months before running her first marathon.

• The negotiations turned into a marathon that lasted all night.

• Thousands of runners line up at the start of the city marathon each spring.

• Revising for final exams felt like a mental marathon.

Where does marathon come from?

Language of origin: Greek

The word comes from Marathon, the name of a plain in ancient Greece north-east of Athens. According to tradition, after the Greeks defeated the Persians there in 490 BC, a messenger ran the roughly forty kilometres from Marathon to Athens to announce the victory before collapsing. When the modern Olympic Games were revived in 1896, organisers invented a long-distance foot race and named it the marathon in honour of that legendary run. From the early twentieth century the word broadened in English to mean any long, gruelling endurance test, athletic or otherwise. The Greek place name itself is thought to derive from 'marathon', meaning a field of fennel, since wild fennel grew on the plain, which is a useful reminder that the spelling keeps the single 'r' and the 'th' of its Greek origin.

How the word is built

• Marathon (Greek place name) used as a root; no productive affixes, though it now functions loosely as a combining element in words like 'telethon'