Stadium

How to spell stadium

7 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce stadium

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does stadium mean?

1. nounA large enclosed sports ground surrounded by tiers of seats for spectators.

Stadium in a sentence

• The new stadium holds sixty thousand fans for football matches.

• Traffic was gridlocked near the stadium before the concert began.

Where does stadium come from?

Language of origin: Greek

The word comes from the ancient Greek stadion, which was both a measure of distance (about 185 metres) and the running track laid out over that exact length for foot races. The track gave its name to the banked enclosure of seats built around it, so the place where spectators gathered came to share the name of the race itself. Latin took the word over as stadium, keeping both the unit-of-length sense and the arena sense, and from there it passed into English in the late 1500s. The Latin -um ending is why the traditional learned plural is 'stadia', although 'stadiums' is now perfectly standard. A useful spelling cue is that the middle is plain -di-, not -dium with anything doubled, and the word ends in the Latin -um, just like 'medium' and 'podium'.

How the word is built

• stadi- (from Greek stadion, a unit of length and a foot-race track)
• -um (Latin noun suffix)