Umpire

How to spell umpire

6 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce umpire

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does umpire mean?

1. nounAn official who enforces the rules and judges play in a sport such as cricket, baseball or tennis.
2. verbTo act as the official who judges and enforces the rules of a match or contest.

Umpire in a sentence

• noun

  The cricket umpire raised one finger to signal that the batsman was out.

• verb

  A retired professional agreed to umpire the charity match this weekend.

• noun

  A tennis umpire overruled the line call after reviewing the replay.

• verb

  Volunteers were trained to umpire the junior league fixtures.

Where does umpire come from?

Language of origin: French

Umpire comes from the Old French word 'nonper', which literally meant 'not equal' or 'odd one out', formed from 'non' (not) and 'per' (equal or peer, the same root as the English word 'peer'). The idea was of a third, impartial person brought in to settle a dispute between two equal sides; being the odd number, this person could break a deadlock. Middle English borrowed it as 'noumpere', but over time the 'n' was misheard and shifted across the indefinite article: 'a noumpere' was rebracketed as 'an oumpere', leaving the modern form 'umpire'. This same kind of mistaken word-splitting, called rebracketing, also produced 'apron' (from 'napron') and 'adder' (from 'naddere'), which is why the spelling no longer shows the original 'n'. The word arrived in the 1400s in the sense of a neutral arbitrator and only later narrowed to its familiar role as the official who enforces the rules of a sport.

How the word is built

• From earlier 'noumpere', a re-divided form of Old French 'nonper': non- (not)
• per (equal, peer)