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medal

nounverbcommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom/[ˈmɛd.ɫ̩]/
  • United States/[ˈmɛɾ.ɫ̩]/
  • Australia/[ˈmeɾ.ɫ̩]/
  • //ˈmɛdəl//

A stamped metal disc used as a personal ornament, a charm, or a religious object.

noun

  1. 1

    A stamped metal disc used as a personal ornament, a charm, or a religious object.

    Whether their images, shrines, relics, consecrated things, holy water, medals, benedictions, those divine amulets, holy exorcisms, and the sign of the cross, be available in this disease?

  2. 2

    A stamped or cast metal object (usually a disc), particularly one awarded as a prize or reward.

  3. 3

    obsoleteA Roman or Italian coin.

Etymology

From Middle English [Term?], from Middle French medaille, medale, from Italian medaglia (originally "half a denarius"), from Early Medieval Latin medālia, feminine derived via dissimilation (/dj–lj/ > /d–lj/) from mediālia, neuter plural of Late Latin mediālis (“middle”, adjective), from Classical Latin medius.

verb

  1. 1

    To win a medal.

    He medalled twice at the Olympics.

    I dashed into the mall; bought a gift; raced to the card store, snapped up a two-fer gift-bag special and was back in my car in 26 minutes. I could medal in power shopping.

    Vocab-wise, medalling and PB-ing are now totally part-and-parcelled, and most experts in South Korea believe podiumed, finalled and all-comered are not far off lexiconing.

    I wanted to medal. I was pregnant and I wanted to medal.

  2. 2

    To award a medal to.

Forms

plural
medals
past tense
medaled, medalled
past participle
medaled, medalled
present participle
medaling, medalling
third person singular
medals
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).