Putt

How to spell putt

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce putt

What does putt mean?

1. verbTo strike a golf ball gently along the ground, usually on the green, so it rolls toward the hole.
2. nounA stroke made with a putter to roll the golf ball toward or into the hole.

Putt in a sentence

• verb

  He had to putt from six feet to win the match.

• noun

  A single missed putt cost him the championship.

• verb

  She practised how to putt the ball straight into the cup for an hour.

• noun

  Her long putt rolled across the green and dropped into the cup.

Where does putt come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Putt is a golfing word that began life as a Scottish form of the ordinary English verb 'put', which descends from the Old English 'putian', meaning to push, thrust, or place. In Scots dialect 'put' was often pronounced and written with the short 'uh' vowel, giving 'putt', and golf, a Scottish game, carried that distinctive spelling into the wider language. By the time the word settled into golfing use in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it had narrowed to mean a soft, controlled stroke that rolls the ball gently across the green toward the hole. The doubled 't' is the key to the spelling and to the pronunciation: it signals the short, clipped vowel of 'but' rather than the rounded vowel of everyday 'put'. So while 'put' and 'putt' are really the same ancient word, golf preserved a separate Scots spelling for its own sense, and that is exactly why writers so often confuse the two.

How the word is built

• putt (golf-specific variant spelling of 'put', the gentle stroke)