athletics
- 1Sports, games, and similar physical pursuits that call for stamina, fitness, and skill.
The university's athletics department oversees every varsity team on campus.
Funding for athletics rose sharply after the new gym opened.
Note
In American use the word widens to take in sports and games of every kind. It often stands for the institution as much as the activity: athletics departments, athletics funding, athletics programs. William C. Rhoden, writing in 2009 about the University of Phoenix, sets athletics against higher education itself, so that the word means college sport as an enterprise. The narrower British meaning is the track-and-field family.
- 2Track and field, together with related sports such as road running, cross-country running, and racewalking.
British athletics produced several medallists at the world championships.
She joined the local club to pursue athletics, focusing on the long jump.
Similartrack
Note
A word that changes size between British and American use. Especially in Britain, it names one family of sports, the running, jumping and throwing of the track and the road. A British athletics club means runners and jumpers, not footballers. The word is built from athletic with -ics, probably on the model of gymnastics, and like that word it appears only in plural form. Its American counterpart is the broader sense covering sports generally.
Practice
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Origin
Formed from "athletic" with the suffix "-ics," probably modeled on the word "gymnastics."