Rival

How to spell rival

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce rival

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does rival mean?

1. nounA person or organisation competing with another for the same objective or position.
2. verbTo match or compete with someone or something in quality or extent.

Rival in a sentence

• noun

  The two firms have been each other's main rival for a decade.

• verb

  Few cities can rival the museums of this old capital.

• noun

  She joined the team that had been her fiercest rival at university.

• verb

  The new model aims to rival the market leader on price and range.

Where does rival come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word comes from the Latin rivalis, which originally described a person who uses the same stream or watercourse as another. That noun was built on rivus, meaning 'a brook' or 'small stream', the same root that gives us 'river' and 'derive'. The link to competition is wonderfully concrete: two landowners drawing water from one stream were neighbours forever in dispute over their shared resource, so rivalis came to mean a competitor or someone with an equal claim. English borrowed the word in the late 1500s, partly through French, keeping both the sense of an opponent and the older flavour of two people contending for the same thing. Remembering that 'rival' hides the river-word rivus explains its single 'l' and its simple, regular spelling.

How the word is built

• riv- (from Latin rivus: stream, brook)
• -al (suffix forming noun/adjective)