Tramp

How to spell tramp

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce tramp

What does tramp mean?

1. nounA person with no settled home who travels from place to place on foot, often begging or doing casual work.
2. verbTo walk heavily and steadily, especially over a long distance or rough ground.
3. nounA long walk taken for exercise or to cover ground on foot.

Tramp in a sentence

• noun

  An old tramp slept under the railway bridge each night.

• verb

  We had to tramp across the muddy field to reach the cottage.

• noun

  A brisk tramp over the hills cleared his head after work.

• noun

  The farmer gave the passing tramp a meal and a place in the barn.

• verb

  The hikers will tramp for hours before they reach the summit.

• noun

  They enjoyed a long tramp through the woods on Sunday morning.

Where does tramp come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Tramp comes from a Germanic root meaning to tread or stamp heavily with the feet, and it surfaces in late Middle English as the verb 'trampen', meaning to walk with firm, audible steps. It is closely related to Middle Low German and Middle Dutch 'trampen', and it shares its ancestry with the everyday words 'trample' and 'stamp', all of which carry that same idea of pressing the foot down hard. From the action of walking heavily, the noun sense grew in two directions: a long, effortful walk on foot, and a person who travels about on foot with no settled home. The maritime sense, a 'tramp' steamer that takes cargo wherever work is found rather than following a fixed route, draws on the same picture of wandering without a fixed path. The spelling has stayed simple and phonetic throughout, so the chief difficulty is simply that the word is short and unremarkable rather than tricky.

How the word is built

• tramp (from a Germanic root meaning to tread or stamp heavily); a single, unprefixed stem