Other forms: putting, putts, putted
To putt is to hit a golf ball gently along the green towards the hole. The short careful stroke at the end of a hole, not the long drive.
It is one of golf's own words and it brings equipment with it: a putter is the flat-faced club, the putting green is the smooth grass around the hole, and a putt is the stroke itself. Golfers say the game is won on the greens, which is another way of saying that putting matters more than power does. Note the spelling and the sound — putt has two t's and rhymes with cut, not with put.
Proto-Germanic
*putōną
Scots
putt — to put
English, today
putt
Borrowed from Scots putt (“to put”). Compare Middle Dutch putten (“to dig a pit”). The Old English putian (“to push; thrust; put; place”) derivation is commonly assumed, although no longer valid. In Dutch, the word is instanced in a description of golf in an early seventeenth-century edition of Pieter van Afferden's Tyrocinium linguae latinae. All derive from Proto-Germanic putōną.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA