Volleyball is the team game in which a ball is hit over a high net with the hands and must not touch the floor. Play volleyball, a volleyball court, beach volleyball.
Indoor volleyball has six players a side and beach volleyball two, and both are Olympic sports. A team may touch the ball three times before returning it, which is where the standard bump, set and spike sequence comes from. Note volley, the shot in tennis and football, from the same word; and that a volleyball is softer and lighter than it looks and still hurts.
1nounvolleyballA team game of hitting a ball over a high net with the hands.
“The school volleyball team practised spiking the ball over the net.”
volleyball is a team sport.
Volley comes from French volée, a flight, from voler, to fly — a volley is a ball struck in flight. The game was named in 1896 for exactly that, having first been called mintonette for about a year.
Proto-Indo-European
*gʷelH-
English, today
volleyball
From volley + ball. From volley + ball. In 1895, in Holyoke, Massachusetts, William G. Morgan created a new game called Mintonette, a name derived from the game of badminton. After an observer, Alfred Halstead, noticed the volleying nature of the game at its first exhibition match in 1896, played at the International YMCA Training School (now called Springfield College), the game quickly became known as volleyball (it was originally spelled as two words: "volley ball")
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA