Trampoline

How to spell trampoline

10 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce trampoline

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does trampoline mean?

1. nounA strong fabric sheet stretched over a frame by springs, used for bouncing and gymnastics.

Trampoline in a sentence

• The children spent the whole afternoon bouncing on the garden trampoline.

• She assembled the new trampoline before the birthday party started.

Where does trampoline come from?

Language of origin: Italian

This word comes from the Italian trampolino, meaning 'springboard' or 'diving board', which was built on trampolo, meaning 'stilt'. That root is ultimately of Germanic origin, connected to the same family of words that gave us 'tramp', in the sense of treading or stamping heavily on the ground. The Italian sense of a bouncing springboard passed into other European languages, and English adopted the form trampoline in the early twentieth century. The modern springy apparatus was popularised and named in the 1930s by the American gymnast George Nissen, who is often credited with adapting the Italian word as a brand. The spelling trap lives at the end: the unstressed final syllable sounds like 'leen' but is written -line, and there is only one l in the middle, not two.

How the word is built

• trampolin- (from Italian trampolino: springboard)
• -e (English spelling)