Scooter

How to spell scooter

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce scooter

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does scooter mean?

1. nounA light two-wheeled vehicle ridden by pushing one foot against the ground, or a small motorised version of the same.

Scooter in a sentence

• The child rode a scooter along the pavement to school.

• He commutes across the city on an electric scooter.

Where does scooter come from?

Language of origin: Old Norse

Scooter is built on the verb 'scoot', meaning to dart or move off quickly, with the agent suffix -er added to name a thing that scoots along. The root scoot is thought to come from a Scandinavian source related to Old Norse 'skjota', meaning 'to shoot' or 'to push out swiftly', and it shares ancestry with the English verb 'shoot'. The verb appears in English from around the 1700s, and 'scooter' followed in the 1800s, first describing a child's foot-propelled vehicle that you push along the ground. When small petrol engines became common in the twentieth century, the same word stretched to cover the motor scooter. The double 'o' simply mirrors the long vowel of scoot, which is the part of the spelling most worth fixing in memory.

How the word is built

• scoot (to go quickly)
• -er (noun suffix: a thing that does the action)