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golf

nounverbcommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ɡɒlf//
  • United Kingdom//ɡɒf//
  • United States//ɡɑlf//
  • United States//ɡɔlf//
  • //ɡɒf//

A ball game played by individuals competing against one another in which the object is to hit a ball into each of a series of (usually 18 or nine) holes in the minimum number of strokes.

noun

  1. 1

    A ball game played by individuals competing against one another in which the object is to hit a ball into each of a series of (usually 18 or nine) holes in the minimum number of strokes.

    In January, China’s state planner said it had ordered the closure of more than 100 golf courses in a multi-year campaign launched in 2011 to tackle illegal development in the sector. Golf has also been added to a list of Communist Party disciplinary violations, and is often cited in cases of graft.

  2. 2

    Variant of Golf from the NATO/ICAO Phonetic AlphabetAlternative letter-case form of Golf from the NATO/ICAO Phonetic Alphabet.

Etymology

The word is first known in English from the 17th century as a borrowing from Middle Scots golf, gouff. Although the etymology is uncertain, the most likely origin is that it comes from the Middle Dutch colve, colf (“club”), ultimately from Proto-Germanic *kulbaz (“club”), related to German Kolben (“piston, rod”), Swedish kolv (“piston, rod”), Old English clopp (“rock; cliff”), English kelp.

verb

  1. 1

    To play the game of golf.

    Last mystery of all, he learned to golf.

  2. 2

    To write something in as few characters as possible (e.g. in code golf, regex golf)

Forms

past tense
golfed
past participle
golfed
present participle
golfing
third person singular
golfs
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).