Tournament

How to spell tournament

10 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce tournament

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does tournament mean?

1. nounA series of contests in which competitors take part until an overall winner emerges.

Tournament in a sentence

• The chess club hosts a weekend tournament every spring.

• Our team reached the final of the regional tournament last year.

Where does tournament come from?

Language of origin: French

This word travelled into English from the Old French tornoiement, the noun form of tornoier, a verb meaning 'to joust' or 'to take part in a mock cavalry battle'. That verb in turn grew from tornei, a 'tourney', and ultimately from the Latin tornare, meaning 'to turn on a lathe', from tornus, a 'lathe' or 'turning tool', a sense Latin had itself borrowed from the Greek tornos. The link to 'turning' makes sense: medieval mounted knights wheeled and turned their horses against one another in the contest. English took the word in around the thirteenth century, originally for these chivalric jousting events, and only much later extended it to any organised series of competitive matches in sport or games. The same Latin tornare also underlies the everyday words 'turn', 'tour' and 'return', which share its core idea of moving around. The spelling trap is the 'our' that survives from the French and the quietly unstressed 'a' before '-ment', which writers often drop or swap.

How the word is built

• tourn- (turn/joust, from Old French tornoier)
• -a- (connecting vowel)
• -ment (noun-forming suffix denoting an action or event)