Ringer

How to spell ringer

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce ringer

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does ringer mean?

1. nounA person or thing that looks almost exactly like another, especially in the phrase 'dead ringer'.
2. nounA competitor or animal secretly substituted to gain an unfair advantage in a contest.
3. nounA person who rings bells, especially the bells of a church.

Ringer in a sentence

• With that haircut he is a dead ringer for his older brother.

• The club was disqualified after fielding a professional ringer in the amateur match.

• Each ringer in the tower pulled a rope in careful sequence.

• The new model is a near ringer for last year's car, just in a different colour.

• The trainer was banned for running a faster ringer under a slower horse's name.

• The cathedral needs another ringer to complete the team for Sunday.

Where does ringer come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The base verb ring comes from the Old English hringan, meaning to make a clear resonant sound such as that of a struck bell, and it has Germanic relatives across the North Sea languages. Adding the agent suffix -er produced ringer, literally one who rings, the oldest sense being a person who sounds church or hand bells. From the sporting world of the nineteenth century came a sharper, slang meaning: a ringer was a horse fraudulently entered under another's name, and the phrase dead ringer then came to describe anything or anyone that looks exactly like something else. The spelling trap is the silent partner wringer (a device that squeezes water from wet cloth), which sounds identical because the initial w of wring is silent; ringer keeps the plain ring root with no w. Holding on to the idea that this word is simply ring plus -er, with no hidden letters, is the surest way to spell it correctly.

How the word is built

• ring (to sound a bell; from Old English hringan)
• -er (agent suffix: one who or that which does)