Score

How to spell score

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce score

What does score mean?

1. nounThe number of points, goals, or marks achieved in a game, test, or competition.
2. verbTo gain a point, goal, or mark in a game, test, or competition.
3. nounA set or group of twenty.
4. nounThe written or printed notation of a piece of music showing all the parts.
5. verbTo cut or scratch a line or mark into a surface.

Score in a sentence

• noun

  The final score of the match was three to one.

• verb

  He needed to score twice more to win the round.

• noun

  A score of volunteers turned up to clear the beach.

• noun

  The conductor turned each page of the score during rehearsal.

• verb

  Use a sharp knife to score the cardboard before folding it.

• noun

  Her exam score qualified her for the advanced course.

Where does score come from?

Language of origin: Old Norse

This word comes from the Old Norse skor, which meant a notch, an incision, or a cut, and from the related verb meaning 'to cut or scratch'. The link to counting is wonderfully practical: people once kept a running tally by cutting notches into a stick or beam, and because a long tally was conveniently grouped into batches of twenty, skor also came to mean the number twenty itself. English absorbed the word during the late Old English period through Scandinavian settlement, and from the idea of a recorded tally it naturally grew into the modern sense of points gained in a game or test. The musical 'score' arose later, in the 1700s, from the practice of drawing scoring lines down a page to align the staves of different instruments. All these meanings, from cutting a line to twenty to a game tally, trace back to that single notion of a notch, which is why the plain spelling has never needed extra letters.

How the word is built

• score (from Old Norse skor: a notch or tally mark used for counting)