Swimmer

How to spell swimmer

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce swimmer

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does swimmer mean?

1. nounA person or animal that swims, especially one who does so skilfully or competitively.

Swimmer in a sentence

• The lifeguard praised the strong swimmer for keeping calm in the rip current.

• Each swimmer on the relay team trained twice a day before the championships.

Where does swimmer come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a homegrown English word built on the verb 'swim', which descends from the Old English swimman, meaning to move through water by the action of the limbs. That verb belongs to a wide Germanic family, with close relatives in Old Norse svimma, Dutch zwemmen, and German schwimmen, all carrying the same watery sense. The agent ending '-er', also of native Germanic stock, simply turns the action into the person or thing that performs it, just as it does in 'runner' and 'reader'. The spelling trap lives entirely in that join: because 'swim' ends in a single consonant after a short stressed vowel, the m must double when '-er' is added, giving 'swimmer' rather than the wrong 'swimer'. The same doubling rule governs the related forms 'swimming' and 'swam'.

How the word is built

• swim (Old English swimman: to move through water)
• -er (agent suffix: one who does); the m is doubled before the suffix because the stressed short vowel demands it