Surfer

How to spell surfer

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce surfer

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does surfer mean?

1. nounA person who rides breaking waves on a board.
2. nounA person who browses casually from page to page on the internet.

Surfer in a sentence

• The young surfer waxed her board before paddling out.

• The website was redesigned to keep the casual web surfer engaged for longer.

• Every experienced surfer checks the tide and swell forecast first.

• An idle surfer can lose an hour clicking from one article to the next.

Where does surfer come from?

Language of origin: Unknown

This word is built on the English noun and verb 'surf', plus the agent suffix '-er' that marks a person who performs an action, so a surfer is literally someone who surfs. The base 'surf' is something of a mystery: it appears in English in the late 1600s, originally written 'suffe' or 'surfe', and seems to have referred to the swell or breaking waves of the sea, especially on the coasts of India where English sailors and traders first recorded it. Many scholars suspect it was an imitative or borrowed word, possibly reshaped under the influence of the older English word 'surge', which would explain the unexpected 'r' in the spelling. The sense of riding those waves on a board grew up in Hawaii and the wider Pacific, and the noun 'surfer' for a wave-rider became common only in the twentieth century. Because the origin is genuinely uncertain and the 'r' has no clear source, the safest way to remember the spelling is to anchor it to the familiar word 'surge'.

How the word is built

• surf (the breaking waves of the sea)
• -er (agent suffix: one who does)