tournament
Pluraltournaments
- 1A series of games (either one game repeated or different games on a theme) played competitively to decide a single winning team or person.
The tennis tournament drew players from a dozen countries this year.
Our local club runs a tournament every summer to crown a champion.
UsagePlayers compete in a tournament; teams enter one and try to win it.
Similarcompetition, championship, contest, tourney
- 2In the Middle Ages, a series of staged battles and other contests held to train and test knights for war.
Like preseason scrimmages that prepare a team for the games that count.
The young squire watched the tournament, dreaming of the day he would ride in it.
Lords gathered at the castle for a tournament before the spring campaign.
Note
Today it belongs to writing about the medieval past, where it covers mock combat ranging from crowded melees to single jousts. Modern cups and leagues borrowed the word, so in a present-day context readers assume the sporting meaning unless knights are clearly in view.
Less common meaning
- 3A directed graph formed by giving each edge of a complete graph a direction, so every pair of vertices is joined by exactly one arrow.
Practice
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Origin
The verb "tornoier" gave Old French its noun "tornoiement" (Modern French "tournoiement"), the source of the English word.