Raffle

How to spell raffle

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce raffle

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does raffle mean?

1. nounA lottery in which numbered tickets are sold and a winner is drawn for a prize, usually to raise money.
2. verbTo dispose of an item by selling numbered tickets and drawing a winner.

Raffle in a sentence

• noun

  The school fair held a raffle with a bicycle as the top prize.

• verb

  The committee decided to raffle a hamper at the staff party.

• noun

  She bought five tickets in the charity raffle to support the local library.

• verb

  The restaurant chose to raffle a weekend stay to attract diners.

Where does raffle come from?

Language of origin: French

Raffle came into English in the late 1300s from the Old French word rafle, which named a game of dice and also carried the sense of a sudden snatching or seizing. The French term is connected to the verb rafler, meaning 'to sweep up' or 'to carry off in a grab', which captures the idea of one lucky person sweeping away the prize. Over the centuries the dice game faded and the word settled on its modern meaning: a lottery in which numbered tickets are sold and a winner is drawn for a prize, often to raise money. The same family of grabbing and ransacking words gave English 'rifle' in its older sense of 'to plunder', so the two share a distant ancestry. The spelling trap is the doubled f followed by the silent -le ending, an echo of the French rafle that English doubled to keep the short vowel sound.

How the word is built

• raffle (from Old French rafle, a game of dice involving snatching)
• the doubled -ff- spelling fixed in English