Stumps

How to spell stumps

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce stumps

What does stumps mean?

1. nounThe lower parts of tree trunks left standing in the ground after the trees are cut down.
2. nounThe three upright wooden posts that form the wicket in cricket, or the call marking the end of a day's play.
3. verbCompletely puzzles or baffles someone so that they cannot find an answer.

Stumps in a sentence

• noun

  The loggers left rows of jagged stumps across the cleared hillside.

• noun

  The fast bowler sent the stumps flying with a perfect delivery.

• verb

  The final clue in the crossword always stumps me.

• noun

  Grinding out the old stumps took most of the weekend.

• noun

  Rain forced the umpires to call stumps early on the final day.

• verb

  This fault in the engine stumps even the senior mechanic.

Where does stumps come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The base word stump comes from Middle English stumpe, a word of Germanic origin closely related to the Middle Low German stump and the Dutch stomp, both carrying the sense of 'blunt' or 'truncated'. The underlying idea is something cut off and left short, which is why the worn remains of a felled tree, a broken tooth, or a shortened limb are all called stumps. The figurative verb sense, meaning to baffle someone, grew up in American English in the 1800s, perhaps from the image of a plough being halted by a buried tree stump in a cleared field. In cricket the term names the three upright wooden posts of the wicket, again because they are short, fixed pegs driven into the ground, and 'stumps' came to mean the end of a day's play because that is when the posts are pulled up. The spelling is straightforward, with the only mild trap being the cluster of consonants 'mps' at the end.

How the word is built

• stump (Germanic root for a blunt remnant)
• -s (plural / third-person singular ending)