Teammate

How to spell teammate

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce teammate

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does teammate mean?

1. nounA fellow member of the same team, side, or working group.

Teammate in a sentence

• She passed the ball to her teammate near the goal.

• Every teammate contributed to finishing the project on time.

Where does teammate come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a transparent compound of two old words. 'Team' comes from the Old English 'team', which originally meant a set of draught animals harnessed together to pull a plough or wagon, and only later broadened to any group of people working towards a shared goal. 'Mate' arrived in Middle English from Middle Low German or Dutch 'mat', meaning a companion or someone you share a meal with, and it is related to the word 'meat' in the older sense of food. Joined together, 'teammate' simply names a person on the same side as you, a usage that grew up with organised sport in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The spelling trap is purely mechanical: 'team' ends in 'm' and 'mate' begins with 'm', so the closed compound carries a doubled 'm' in the middle that writers often reduce to one.

How the word is built

• team (a group working together)
• mate (companion, associate)