Winger

How to spell winger

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce winger

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does winger mean?

1. nounAn attacking player positioned near the side touchline in sports such as football, rugby, or hockey.

Winger in a sentence

• The fast winger raced down the touchline and crossed the ball.

• Our coach moved him from midfield to play as a right winger.

Where does winger come from?

Language of origin: Old Norse

This is a modern English formation built from the noun 'wing' plus the agent suffix '-er', which marks a person who does or occupies something. 'Wing' itself came into English in the medieval period from Old Norse 'vaengr', meaning the feathered limb of a bird, and over the centuries the sense broadened to cover anything that projects from the side, such as the wing of a building, an army, or a sports pitch. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as football, rugby, and hockey developed fixed positional names, the wide attacking areas down each touchline were simply called the wings, and the player stationed there became the 'winger'. The spelling is reassuringly regular: keep the single 'g' of 'wing' and add 'er', and note that the 'ng' is pronounced as one sound, not as a hard separate 'g'.

How the word is built

• wing (the side area of play, from the bird's wing)
• -er (agent suffix: one who plays there)