bouldering

nounC1Very rare — outside the 30,000 commonest English words, so you will meet it in writing rather than in speechmostly written

Bouldering is climbing short hard problems without a rope. Go bouldering.

The height is low and the difficulty is high, which is exactly the trade. Bouldering routes are called problems rather than climbs, because they are solved rather than completed.

Definitions of bouldering

1nounboulderingClimbing short hard problems without a rope.C1
“Bouldering wrecked his fingers within a month.”

bouldering is a sport.

Where it comes from

Middle English
bulder
English
boulder
English, today
bouldering

Built from

sten · gmq-osw — stone
bolle · gmq-osw — round drinking vessel, tumbler

boulder comes from late Middle English bulder, short for Middle English bulder ston (“a stone that's been worn into a round shape, boulder, cobblestone”), possibly from gmq-osw buldersten, itself possibly from gmq-osw bulder (“rumble, noise”) + sten (“stone”); whence dialectal Swedish bullersten (“large stone in a stream, causing water to roar around it”). The first element may alternatively be allied to gmq-osw bulle, bolle (“round drinking vessel, tumbler”), from Old Norse bolli, related to Old English bolla (“round object, bowl”), see English bowl.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Sports & Games Played

Practise this word

bouldering in the wild

During the 20th century, bouldering evolved into a separate discipline.
Bouldering
Although there have been various rating systems used throughout the history of bouldering, modern problems usually use either the V-scale or the Fontainebleau scale.
Bouldering
In bouldering (i.e. rock climbing on short routes), the popular systems are the American V-scale (or "Hueco") system (e.g.
Grade (climbing)
A bouldering mat or crashpad (also originally called the sketchpad) is a nylon-enclosed multi-layer foam pad used to give the climber a degree of protection when bouldering.
Bouldering mat
Bouldering mats help prevent climbers from injuring themselves from the continuous and repeated falls onto hard or uneven surfaces that are associated with projecting a bouldering problem.
Bouldering mat

1 / 4

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

the sten family

boulder

bouldering — used too rare to measure · point at the bar for the others

← Vocabulary