Punt

How to spell punt

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce punt

What does punt mean?

1. nounA long, flat-bottomed boat with square ends, moved along by pushing a pole against the riverbed.
2. verbTo kick a ball that is dropped from the hands before it touches the ground.
3. verbTo place a bet or gamble a sum of money, especially on a race or a risky venture.

Punt in a sentence

• noun

  We hired a punt and drifted slowly down the river.

• verb

  On fourth down the team chose to punt the ball deep into their opponents' territory.

• verb

  He likes to punt a few pounds on the horses every Saturday.

• noun

  The wooden punt glided past the willows near the bridge.

• verb

  The player will punt the ball whenever the defence holds firm.

• verb

  Investors may punt on the new technology paying off.

Where does punt come from?

Language of origin: Latin

Punt is a word with several separate histories that happen to share a spelling. The boat sense is the oldest, coming into Old English from the Latin ponto, which described a flat-bottomed ferry or pontoon boat used on rivers; that same Latin word also lies behind the modern 'pontoon'. The sporting sense, meaning to kick a dropped ball before it hits the ground, appeared in English in the 1840s and is of uncertain origin, possibly a dialect variant of 'bunt' meaning to push or butt. The gambling sense, popular in British use, came from the card game basset and faro through the French ponter, 'to lay a stake against the bank'. Because these strands arrived from different directions yet collapsed onto one short spelling, punt now carries boats, kicks, and bets all at once.

How the word is built

• punt (a single root word; no prefix or suffix)