Sport & ContestGreek → English
Gymnastics
/dʒɪmˈnæstɪks/noun
Exercises performed on apparatus or the floor, judged on strength and control.
The Greek roots
γυμνάζειν
gymnázein
to train naked
Literally: “the art of exercising naked”
Follow a root:γυμνάζειν1 word
The story of the word
The nakedness was not incidental: Greek athletes trained and competed stripped, and Thucydides treats the abandoning of the loincloth as one of the marks separating Greeks from everyone else. English took the word in the 1570s for physical training in general, and the modern sport with its bars and beams is a nineteenth-century German and Swedish invention fitted to an old name. The word also stretched to mean any display of agility, so mental gymnastics is doing exactly what the root allows.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
- First recorded
- 1570s
Same family
gymgymnasiumgymnastgymnosperm
In a sentence
She did gymnastics until her knees gave out at nineteen.