Match

How to spell match

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce match

What does match mean?

1. verbTo correspond with, equal, or pair suitably with something else.
2. nounA sporting contest between opposing players or teams.
3. nounA short stick with a chemical tip that produces a flame when struck.

Match in a sentence

• verb

  The paint needs to match the existing colour on the wall.

• noun

  The tennis match ran for nearly four hours.

• noun

  She struck a match to light the candle.

• verb

  These figures do not match the totals in the bank statement.

• noun

  Rain delayed the start of the cricket match.

• noun

  He lit the stove with a single match.

Where does match come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is really two words that ended up spelled the same way. The 'pair, equal, contest' sense descends from the Old English gemaecca, meaning a mate, companion, or one who is equal to another, and it carried the idea of two things that suit or correspond. The 'fire-lighting stick' sense came in much later through Old French meiche and ultimately Latin myxa, originally meaning the wick of a lamp; this gave English the slow-burning cord soldiers used to fire early guns before it shifted to the small chemical-tipped stick we know today. Because both senses settled on the short, blunt spelling 'match', a fluent writer rarely pauses over it, even though the noun and verb stretch across very different everyday contexts. The native pairing sense also gave us the verb 'to match', meaning to make things correspond.

How the word is built

• match (single root, no prefix or suffix; the contest sense and the fire-stick sense come from two unrelated Old roots that fell together in spelling)