Other forms: bounced, bouncing, bounces
Bounce is what a ball does when it hits the ground and springs straight back up. A basketball on concrete, a coin dropped on a tiled floor, a child on a mattress until the springs complain.
You bounce a ball, and a ball bounces: the verb works both ways round. Light bounces off a mirror, and you bounce an idea off a friend to hear what comes back. Money and mail borrow the word too, so a cheque bounces when the bank sends it back unpaid, and an email bounces when the address is dead. To bounce back is to recover, after an illness or after a bad year. As a noun it covers both the movement and the springiness: the ball took an awkward bounce, her hair has plenty of bounce.
1verbbounceTo spring back up or away after hitting a surface.~34%
“The ball bounced twice on the table and then off the edge.”
2verbmoveTo move along in springing jumps.~11%
“The puppy bounced across the lawn to meet us.”
3verbthrowTo throw or knock something against a surface so that it springs back.~11%
“He bounced the ball against the garage wall while he waited.”
4verbchequeOf a cheque or an email: to be sent back because it cannot be accepted or delivered.~33%
“Her rent cheque bounced and the landlord phoned the next morning.”
5nounmovementA springing movement away from a surface, or the springiness that allows it.~11%
“The ball took a strange bounce off the wet grass.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 10 sentences found in the wild and placed 9 of them on a sense (1 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Bounce goes back to Middle English bounsen or bunsen, which meant to beat or thump, with a Scots cousin bonce. Where it came from before that, nobody knows. It may simply be the sound written down, in the same family as bump, thump and Dutch bonzen, to thump or throb.
Middle English
bounsen
English, today
bounce
Built from
From Middle English bounsen, bunsen (“to beat, thump”), cognate with Scots bunce, bonce (“to bounce”). Of unknown origin. Perhaps imitative of the sound, related to bump, or related to Middle English bonchen (“to pound, beat”) and Dutch bonken (“to bump”). Compare stq bumzje (“to pound, bang, bounce”), West Frisian bûnzje (“to throb, bounce, pulsate”), Dutch bonzen (“to thump, knock, throb, bounce”), German Low German bunsen, bumsen (“to beat, bounce”), German bumsen (“to thud, bang, pound”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA