Tennis
nounA racket sport in which two or four players hit a ball over a net on a marked court.
How to spell tennis
6 letters · 2 syllables
How to pronounce tennis
Say the part in capitals loudest.
What does tennis mean?
- nounA racket sport in which two or four players hit a ball over a net on a marked court.
Tennis in a sentence
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She booked a tennis court for early on Saturday morning.
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He restrung his tennis racket before the club tournament.
Where does tennis come from?
Language of origin: French
Tennis traces back to the Old French word tenez, the imperative of tenir 'to hold' or 'to take', a call that the server shouted to an opponent just before striking the ball, roughly meaning 'here it comes, take it'. English speakers heard this cry and adapted it into the noun for the game itself, with the spelling settling into forms like 'tenetz' and 'tenys' in the late 1300s before stabilising as 'tennis'. The original game was real tennis, played indoors against walls, and the modern outdoor lawn game took the old name when it was codified in the 1870s. The doubled n is the only mild trap in an otherwise phonetic word, a relic of the way the borrowed sound was anglicised. Curiously, the same tenir root gives English 'tenant' and 'tenacious', both carrying the sense of holding on.
How the word is built
- tenn- (from Old French tenez, 'hold/take', the server's call)
- -is (English adaptation)
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