Other forms: skateboarding, skateboards
A skateboard is a short board on four small wheels that you stand on and push along with one foot. The one that clatters down a handrail in a car park, the one propped against a bedroom door.
Skateboard is a verb too — he skateboards to school — but the name for the activity is skateboarding, and people shorten it to skating. The person doing it is a skateboarder, or just a skater. The parts have names worth knowing: the deck is the board itself, the trucks are the metal axles underneath, and the tail is the kicked-up back end you stamp on to lift the front. Car makers have borrowed the word as well — the flat slab of battery and wheels an electric car is built on top of is called a skateboard, because that is what it looks like.
1nounskateboardA short board on four small wheels that you stand on and push along with one foot.
“He carried his skateboard under one arm all the way home.”
2verbrideTo ride a skateboard.
“They skateboard down to the seafront every evening.”
skateboard is a wheeled board.
Skate plus board, and no more mystery than that. The board you stand on came first, in the middle of the twentieth century. The other skateboard, the flat base an electric car is built on, was named long afterwards purely for the resemblance.
From skate + board. The foot-treadable skateboard sense (Q15783) came first (mid-20th century). The vehicle chassis sense (Q105560157) was named for its resemblance thereto (late 20th or early 21st century).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in Sports & Fitness, A Man Called Ove, Games & Toys
First appears in chapter 20 of A Man Called Ove.
Practise this word