Pool

How to spell pool

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce pool

What does pool mean?

1. nounA small body of still water, or a constructed tank of water for swimming.
2. nounA combined supply of money, people, or resources shared among several users.
3. nounA cue sport played with numbered balls on a table with pockets.
4. verbTo combine money or resources for shared use.

Pool in a sentence

• noun

  The hotel pool was heated to a comfortable temperature.

• noun

  The company drew new hires from a wide talent pool.

• noun

  They played a quick game of pool at the pub after work.

• verb

  The partners agreed to pool their savings for the deposit.

• noun

  After the storm a shallow pool formed in the field.

• noun

  Each employee paid into the office lottery pool.

Where does pool come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

English actually carries two words that fell together as 'pool'. The older one is the body of water, from Old English 'pōl', a small pond or pit of standing water, which has close cousins across the Germanic family such as Dutch 'poel' and German 'Pfuhl', all describing a puddle or muddy hollow. The newer 'pool' meaning a shared stake or kitty came in during the 1600s from French 'poule', which literally meant 'hen' but had drifted into gambling slang for the collective pot of bets, perhaps from the image of a hen as a prize or target. From that gambling pot grew both the cue-sports game called pool and the modern business sense of a pooled fund, a typing pool, or a car pool. Because both threads landed on the same four letters, today the still-water pond and the shared resource look identical on the page even though they arrived by completely separate routes. The spelling stays simple because the double 'o' has tracked the long 'oo' sound consistently since Old English.

How the word is built

• single root: Old English pōl (a small body of standing water); the gaming and shared-fund senses derive from a separate French source, poule