Touchdown

How to spell touchdown

9 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce touchdown

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does touchdown mean?

1. nounA score in American or Canadian football made by carrying or catching the ball in the opponent's end zone.
2. nounThe moment when an aircraft or spacecraft lands and makes contact with the ground.

Touchdown in a sentence

• The home team scored a touchdown in the final minute to win the game.

• The pilot announced a smooth touchdown shortly before the seatbelt sign switched off.

• The quarterback threw for three touchdown passes during the broadcast.

• Engineers monitored the probe's touchdown on the surface of the planet.

Where does touchdown come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a straightforward English compound, joining the verb 'touch' with the adverb 'down', and the spelling simply welds the two familiar words together. 'Touch' came into Middle English from the Old French 'tochier', meaning to strike, handle, or come into contact, while 'down' is a native Old English word (from 'dune', a shortening of 'ofdune', meaning 'off the hill' or 'to the ground'). The compound first appears in the sporting world of the nineteenth century: in early rugby and the American game derived from it, a player literally had to touch the ball down on the ground to score, which is why the term means a score even though modern American football no longer requires the touching motion. From the 1930s onward the same image of something settling onto the ground was borrowed by aviation to describe the moment an aircraft's wheels first meet the runway, and later the moment a spacecraft lands. Because both halves are common everyday words, the only real spelling decision is that it is written as one solid word, with no space and no hyphen.

How the word is built

• touch (to make contact)
• down (to the ground); a transparent English compound