Sport & ContestGreek → English
Athletics
/æθˈlɛtɪks/noun
Competitive running, jumping and throwing events.
The Greek roots
ἆθλον
âthlon
prize of a contest
ἀθλητής
athlētḗs
contender for a prize
Literally: “the business of prize-seekers”
The story of the word
The prize is inside the word. ἆθλον is the thing you compete for and ἆθλος the struggle to get it, so an athlete is by definition someone playing for stakes. This makes the Victorian ideal of the amateur athlete a contradiction the Greeks would not have understood: Olympic victors took a wreath at the sanctuary and then a pension, free meals and a statue from their home city. The same root counts out the decathlon and the pentathlon.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
- First recorded
- 1730s
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
athletedecathlonpentathlonbiathlontriathlon
In a sentence
She gave up swimming for athletics at fifteen and made the county team in a year.