Sport & ContestGreek → English
Paralympian
/ˌpærəˈlɪmpiən/noun
An athlete who competes at the Paralympic Games.
The Greek roots
παρά
pará
beside, alongside
Ὀλυμπία
Olympía
Olympia, site of the games
Literally: “one beside the Olympian”
The story of the word
Formed on Olympian, with para- now read as beside rather than the paraplegic it originally punned on. Olympian carried a confusion of its own from the start: Mount Olympus in Thessaly, where the gods lived, and Olympia in the Peloponnese, where the games were held, are different places roughly three hundred kilometres apart. The word came into general English as the games grew after Seoul in 1988, the first Games since Tokyo 1964 to use the same city and venues as the Olympics.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → modern coinage → English
Same family
paralympicolympianolympic
In a sentence
Two Paralympians from the same club made the team.
She was a Paralympian at seventeen and a coach by twenty-six.