There are triathlons and pentathlons but what exactly is an athlon?

SPONSOR: GotoMeeting Hold your meetings online for just $49/mo. Try GoToMeeting FREE for 30 days.

The word athlete came to us from Greek via Latin and first appeared in English in 1528.  The original Greek word from which athlete evolved may have been athlon which was the word both for “contest” and “prize.”

This is analogous to how the word cup is both a soccer or hockey tournament and the prize as well; think of the Stanley Cup in hockey and the World Cup in soccer.

The Oxford English Dictionary cites the first appearance in English of athlete in a translation from Latin by one Thomas Paynell.

He left the original Latin title Regimen Sanitatis Salerni on the work and that translates roughly to “The Salerno Guide to Health.”

Paynell gave the book an English subtitle: “This booke teachyng all people to governe the[m] in health.”

According to Paynell, or at least according to the original Latin authors, “Porke..nourisheth mooste: wherof those that be called athlete haue beste experience.”

According to The Oxford Companion to the Body, the British interpretation of the word athlete has until recently been limited to someone involved in track & field events. The OED expands that to include sports like boxing and wrestling that were popular in both ancient Greece and Rome.

These days though an athlete is someone involved in practically any vigorous physical activity, even if they are not contending for a prize.

That root word athlon doesn’t appear in English dictionaries but many of its children do. For instance there is biathlon and triathlon with two and three activities respectively within the same contest.

A contest with four events can be called either a quadrathlon or a tetrathlon; pentathlon is five; heptathlon seven; and decathlon ten.

Though it isn’t in any of the dictionaries I checked, the word sextathnlon is out there on the internet and although I was a little nervous about typing it into a search engine I was relieved to see that the first link at least was innocent enough; it referred to a swim meet.