Tourney

How to spell tourney

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce tourney

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does tourney mean?

1. nounA tournament or organised series of contests, especially in sport or games.

Tourney in a sentence

• The club entered a weekend chess tourney at the community centre.

• Our five-a-side team reached the final of the local tourney.

Where does tourney come from?

Language of origin: French

This word goes back to the Latin verb tornare, which meant 'to turn on a lathe' or simply 'to turn'. In Old French this developed into tornei and the verb torneier, used for the medieval contest in which mounted knights wheeled and charged at one another, the turning of horse and lance giving the sport its name. English borrowed the word in the 1200s, and for centuries 'tourney' described exactly that kind of jousting meet. Over time the meaning broadened to cover any organised competition, and the longer form 'tournament', built on the same French root, became the more formal sibling. The spelling trap lives in the middle and the end: the 'ou' echoes the French origin while the '-ey' ending tempts writers toward the more obvious '-ny'.

How the word is built

• tourn- (to turn, from Latin tornare)
• -ey (noun suffix)