Scrum

How to spell scrum

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce scrum

What does scrum mean?

1. nounIn rugby, a tight formation in which opposing forwards pack together and push to contest possession of the ball.
2. nounA short daily meeting, or a framework of working, used by teams to plan and review tasks.
3. nounA disorderly crowd of people pushing and jostling together.

Scrum in a sentence

• The referee ordered a scrum after the forward pass.

• The developers hold a quick scrum every morning at nine.

• There was a frantic scrum at the doors when the sale opened.

• The front row collapsed the scrum near the try line.

• Our project manager runs the scrum to track this week's tasks.

• Commuters formed a noisy scrum around the single ticket machine.

Where does scrum come from?

Language of origin: French

Scrum is a clipped, shortened form of scrummage, which is itself a casual alteration of scrimmage, a word that in turn descends from skirmish. Skirmish reached English in the 1300s by way of Old French escarmouche, meaning a small fight or brush between troops, with roots in an Old Italian and ultimately Germanic word for fighting or fencing. Rugby players trimmed scrummage down to the brisk, single-syllable scrum in the late nineteenth century to name the tight pack of forwards binding together to contest the ball. Because the spelling simply chops the longer word, it ends in that slightly unusual bare -um, with no silent or doubled letters to negotiate. In recent decades the same word jumped from the sports field into office life, where software teams borrowed scrum as the name for a short, focused planning meeting and a whole way of organising work.

How the word is built

• scrum (shortened form of scrummage, itself an alteration of scrimmage)