Racket

How to spell racket

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce racket

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does racket mean?

1. nounA loud, unpleasant, disturbing noise or commotion.
2. nounA dishonest or fraudulent scheme for making money, often involving extortion.
3. nounA bat with a netted frame and handle, used to strike a ball or shuttlecock in games such as tennis and badminton.

Racket in a sentence

• The builders next door made such a racket that nobody could concentrate.

• The police uncovered a protection racket run by a local gang.

• She restrung her tennis racket before the tournament.

• She could not sleep through the racket of the late-night traffic.

• Investigators traced the insurance racket to three corrupt brokers.

• The badminton racket felt too light for his liking.

Where does racket come from?

Language of origin: Arabic

This word actually braids together two separate stories that happen to share a spelling. The sense meaning a sporting bat traces back to the Arabic word rahat, meaning 'the palm of the hand', the body part you would once have used to strike a ball before stringed frames existed; that word passed into medieval French as raquette and reached English in the 1500s, which is also why the alternative spelling 'racquet' survives. The very different sense of a loud, confused noise is generally thought to be imitative in origin, simply echoing a clattering din, and it first appears in English in the same century. From the noise sense the figurative meaning grew: a 'racket' became a fuss or commotion, and by the early twentieth century, especially in American usage, a dishonest scheme or extortion business that made a great deal of disreputable 'noise'. Because the imitative source is uncertain, the precise history of the noise and scheme senses cannot be pinned down with confidence.

How the word is built

• racket (single root; no prefix or suffix), unrelated to '-et' as a diminutive despite appearances