# stadium

Pronunciation: say "STAY-dee-uhm" /ˈsteɪ.di.əm/

## Noun

1. A large venue with tiered seating where sporting events are held.
   - Simple: A large place with seats where people watch sports games.
   - _The stadium fell silent before the final penalty kick._
   - _Crews spent two years building the Olympic stadium._
2. A racecourse in ancient Greece, especially the course used for foot races at the Olympic Games.
   - Simple: A running track in ancient Greece, especially the one used for races at the Olympics.
   - _At ancient Olympia, runners sprinted the full length of the stadium in the oldest race of the Games._
   - _The ancient stadium at Olympia had no stone seats, so spectators sat on the earth banks along the track._
3. A Greek unit of length equal to about 185 meters, the same as a stadion.
   - Simple: An old Greek measure of length, about 185 meters.
   - _The messenger ran nearly forty stadia to deliver the news._
   - _Ancient writers gave the river's width as half a stadium._

## Other meanings

- (noun) A distinct developmental stage in the life cycle of an organism.
- (noun) A graduated rod that a surveyor sights through a telescope, reading the marks between two fixed wires to calculate distance.
- (noun) A telemeter that gauges the distance to an object of known size by measuring the angle that object subtends in view.

## Origin

From Latin stadium ("a measure of length, a racecourse"), commonly one-eighth of a Roman mile, which came from Ancient Greek stádion, a measure of length or running track, especially the track at Olympia that was one stadium long. The Greek word may have meant, literally, "fixed standard of length," being formed from stádios ("firm, fixed"), which goes back to Proto-Indo-European *steh₂-, also the root of stand and of Latin stare.

Source: DictionaryAI, https://dictionaryai.com/define/stadium (written from Wiktionary data, CC BY-SA 4.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/).