Sport & ContestGreek → English
Olympian
/əˈlɪmpiən/noun
A competitor at the Olympic Games, one of the twelve chief Greek gods, or a person of lofty detachment.
The Greek roots
Ὀλύμπιος
Olýmpios
of Mount Olympus
Ὄλυμπος
Ólympos
Mount Olympus
Literally: “belonging to Olympus”
The story of the word
Two different places hide inside the one word. The gods lived on Mount Olympus in Thessaly; the Games were held at Olympia in Elis, roughly two hundred miles south in the Peloponnese. English rolled them together. The sense of aloof grandeur, Olympian calm, Olympian disdain, comes from the gods and was in use in English well before any modern athlete existed.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
- First recorded
- 16th century
Same family
OlympicOlympiadOlympus
In a sentence
Three Olympians came out of that one swimming club.
He watched the argument with Olympian detachment.