Stadium
noun ·Moderate ·High school level
Definitions
- 1 A venue where sporting events are held.
"He is going for a cricket match at the stadium."
- 2 a large structure for open-air sports or entertainments wordnet
- 3 An Ancient Greek racecourse, especially, the Olympic course for foot races.
- 4 Synonym of stadion, a Greek unit of length equivalent to about 185 m. historical
"Dionysiodorus[…]sent a letter ad superos after he was dead, from the centre of the earth, to signify what distance the same centre was from the superficies of the same, viz. 42,000 stadiums […]."
- 5 A kind of telemeter for measuring the distance of an object of known dimensions, by observing the angle it subtends.
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- 6 A graduated rod used to measure the distance of the place where it stands from an instrument having a telescope, by observing the number of the graduations of the rod that are seen between certain parallel wires (stadia wires) in the field of view of the telescope.
- 7 A life stage of an organism.
Example
More examples"The excited crowd poured out of the stadium."
Etymology
From Latin stadium (“a measure of length, a race course”) (commonly one-eighth of a Roman mile; translated in early English Bibles by furlong), from Ancient Greek στάδιον (stádion, “a measure of length, a running track”), especially the track at Olympia, which was one stadium in length. The Greek word may literally mean "fixed standard of length" (from στάδιος (stádios, “firm, fixed”), from Proto-Indo-European *steh₂-, whence also stand and Latin stare). Doublet of stade, stadion, and estadio.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.