Muireann Maguire’s Facebook post introduced me to a new word: “Extremely pleased we made it to this beautiful place, the biggest tombolo (not to be confused with a tombola, which tends to involve the Women’s Institute) in the UK.” I was familiar with tombola but not tombolo, which that Wikipedia article defines as “a sandy or shingle isthmus,” adding:
A tombolo, from the Italian tombolo, meaning ‘pillow’ or ‘cushion’, and sometimes translated incorrectly as ayre (an ayre is a shingle beach of any kind), is a deposition landform by which an island becomes attached to the mainland by a narrow piece of land such as a spit or bar.
All well and good, but I wanted to know more, so I went to the OED, where I found the following etymology:
< Italian tombolo sand dune, tombolo (1763) < classical Latin tumulus tumulus n., with folk-etymological alteration after Italian tomba tomb n.
But I was surprised by the pronunciation they gave, which is:
British English /tɒmˈbəʊləʊ/ tom-BOH-loh
U.S. English /tɑmˈboʊloʊ/ tahm-BOH-loh
Surely, thought I, the Italian word has the stress on the first syllable, and this turned out to be the case (Wiktionary). So I turned to AHD, which gives the pronunciation as (tŏm′bə-lō′), with the stress on the first syllable. Merriam-Webster says the same; neither gives a penultimate stress even as an alternate. So the OED is completely wrong about U.S. English!
Furthermore, for tombola the OED says:
British English /tɒmˈbəʊlə/ tom-BOH-luh
U.S. English /tɑmˈboʊlə/ tahm-BOH-luh
/ˈtɑmbələ/ TAHM-buh-luh
But again Merriam-Webster gives only initial stress for the US (“ˈtām-bə-lə British usually täm-ˈbō-lə”), with no alternate penultimate stress (AHD, oddly, doesn’t have the word). So here too the OED is misleading about US usage. (For what it’s worth, I myself use initial stress for tombola, and though I’d never seen tombolo my instinct was the same there.)
Yet the Oxford Learner’s Dictionaries site has tombolo with initial stress for both UK and US. Odd. Maybe both ways are in use? It’s a specialty word, we need a geologist.
“AHD, oddly, doesn’t have the word” — editing error?
editing error?
What do you mean?
tombola: MW’s transcription “ˈtām-bə-lə” has the wrong vowel in the first syllable, but the audio is right.
AHD does have the word, you linked it.
La cultura dei tomboli.
It’s a little weird that tombolo doesn’t seem to mean burial mound specifically.
AHD, for whatever reason, has tombolo, which is rare, but not tombola, which is common.
La culture des tombeaus.
AHD does have the word, you linked it.
That was tombolo; what AHD lacks is the more common word tombola, which if you take another look you’ll see is the word under discussion in that paragraph.
Or what Jen said while I was typing.
Oh. La cultura delle tombole is different.
The sites are characterized by a random collection of cheap goods and home-made pastry..
Is “tombola” common in US English? I’m surprised there would even be a specifically US pronunciation. I’ve never encountered the word outside of British shows and novels, but maybe I just don’t go to enough fairs. Merriam-Webster describes the word as chiefly British.
Is “tombola” common in US English?
Certainly not, but it’s more common than “tombolo,” which I have literally never seen before.
[Edited to add: for “have literally never” read “had forgotten I had”; see comments below.]
But to take this and run in a different direction: Ayre is obviously from O.N. eyrr “reef, sandy or pebbly bank, especially near a rivermouth”, It’s a toponym or toponymic element all over Scandinavia, e.g. in Øresund “the Sound” and Helsingør (Hamlet’s Elsinore) and in Eyraþing, the most authorative assembly for determination of kingship (and thus sought and extorted by aspiring kings) in the early Norwegian kingdom, held on the sandy banks by the mouth of the river Nið.
We (my wife) and I are familiar with the tombolo, they are common here on the Pacific Coast. Both of us pronounce it as tom-BO-lo and have never heard it pronounced otherwise. (However we have hardly ever heard it pronounced by other people at all.) Typically a tombolo is submerged at high tide but I suppose that doesn’t have to be the case.
As for “tombola”, never heard of it.
And does the OED really use the term “U.S. English”? We Canadians don’t like to be told that we speak U.S. English — calling it “American English” like almost everybody else does would be fine though.
Maybe there is divergence in AmE between speakers who learnt the word from BrE speakers and those who learned it from traditional AmE, like a phono-etymological doublet
I’m with Paul Clapham. I’ve heard tomBOlo, spoken by a naturalist; the one he was talking about has a road on it and is kept from flooding. I’ve never heard of tombola, which seems to be very similar to bingo. Do the two ever coexist anywhere?
I see nothing to prevent a tombola from being held on a tombolo.
if you take another look you’ll see is the word under discussion in that paragraph.
D’oh, that’ll teach me to try to comment while running to catch a plane!
Like Paul, I know tombolo, the word and the concept, with a stress on the second vowel. Never heard of the other one.
ktschwartz’s mistake was embarrassing, but not as embarrassing as the admission of her utter addiction to LH, to the extent that she has to access it while running for a plane. 🙂 (I would not be so gauche as to admit that I read it while on the toilet 😉 )
And does the OED really use the term “U.S. English”? We Canadians don’t like to be told that we speak U.S. English — calling it “American English” like almost everybody else does would be fine though.
I think our Oxonian friends are just talking about U. S. English and not telling you Canadians anything.
Maybe there is divergence in AmE between speakers who learnt the word from BrE speakers and those who learned it from traditional AmE, like a phono-etymological doublet
I suspect that very few Americans have learned the pronunciation at all. I’m pretty sure I’ve never heard either “tombola” or “tombolo” pronounced. I also suspect that Americans who have heard “tombola” learnt it in Britain.
Jerry is right, by “U.S. English” the OED means U.S. English. For most words, only UK and US pronunciations are given, but for regionalisms, including Canadianisms, they sometimes have regional pronunciations with their own transcriptions and audio. Some of them can be found via this page:
https://www.oed.com/discover/canadian-english/
and some of the pronunciation sections with Canadian pronunciations are open access.
Huh: teabag 2. Canadian. A bag for carrying provisions; a grocery bag. Now rare.
A tombola is not very similar to bingo, except that they both have numbers. You stand in front of a table which is covered with a range of not particularly desirable things, each of which has a raffle ticket stuck to it – usually the tickets with numbers ending with 5 or 0. Someone offers you a bucket full of folded raffle tickets – all of them this time – and you stick in your hand and pull out as many tickets as you’ve paid for. If you pull out one (or more) of the numbers on the table, you take away the matching prize(s).
I think I’ve only once come across an ‘actual’ tombola, which is a kind of hexagonal cylinder (if that makes sense) which sits on a stand and has a handle on one end to turn it over and over – once the tickets inside are mixed enough you open a hatch in the side and people take the tickets from there instead of a bucket. But the stall’s called that just the same even if the tickets are in a bucket.
(Unless it’s called a bottle stall, in which case the tickets will work just the same and the prizes will include things like lemonade and shampoo as well as beer and wine, but probably won’t include things like teabags and colouring books.)
Raffle tickets a bit like this https://www.paperthings.co.uk/shop/cloakroom-and-raffle-ticket-book-1-400/, not any fancy kind printed for a specific prize draw.
ETA: I mentioned teabags because they’re the last thing I won in a tombola, not because I’m psychic.
We’ve learnt about tombolos and tombolas before, apparently, and got just as confused that time.
https://languagehat.com/tombolo/
Good lord — I could swear I’d checked!
*shuffles off muttering and waving cane*
I only looked because I was suddenly sure I’d described tombolas here before, but I haven’t…
I know that was nine years ago, but still. I could have *sworn* I’d never seen the word!
@Jen
“ I think I’ve only once come across an ‘actual’ tombola, which is a kind of hexagonal cylinder (if that makes sense) which sits on a stand and has a handle on one end to turn it over and over – once the tickets inside are mixed enough you open a hatch in the side and people take the tickets from there instead of a bucket. ”
It makes good sense once you’ve seen a picture. https://entrepreneurscircle.org/wp-content/webp-express/webp-images/uploads/2016/12/tombola.jpg.webp
The only term resembling tombolo or tombola that I know (from childhood) is tom bowler – the coveted larger marble in any worthwhile collection. Wikipedia gives this irritating definition, at the article Marble (toy): “large glass marble at least twice as big as a normal marble”. Big is of course ambiguous; what Wikipedia means is that a tom bowler has at least twice the diameter of a common marble (as opposed to twice the volume, or whatever). I have no idea of the etymology. As kids we never asked.
I vaguely recognized “tombolo” from Twelve Mile Circle. Unfortunately the article doesn’t mention the pronunciation.
I don’t recall having heard of a tombola before; the pictures on Wikipedia do make it look very bingo-like.
I was not previously familiar with the interesting-looking website Jan-F-o-M linked to, and I appreciate the introduction, not least because I was myself born and raised within* the cartographically-exotic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelve-Mile_Circle from which it takes its name. In fact I’m traveling back into that circle this Saturday to attend a memorial service for a fellow I grew up with who was just felled by cancer.
*By which I mean not “within” the entire circle, but within the cartographically-interesting subset of it: west of the river and bulging north of the linear eastward continuation of the Md.-Pa. boundary.
a kind of hexagonal cylinder (if that makes sense)
You could call it a hexagonal prism, or even a right hexagonal prism, though that might mislead people who think first of glass triangular prisms.
I recently acquired a tumbling composter with the same general shape.
https://www.homedepot.com/p/FCMP-Outdoor-Tumbling-Composter-with-Two-Chambers-for-Efficient-Batch-Composting-IM-4000/202672114
@Paul Clapham “And does the OED really use the term “U.S. English”? We Canadians don’t like to be told that we speak U.S. English — calling it “American English.”
====
Would you object, and, if so, on what grounds, to the glottonym North American English (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_English), meaning ‘the English used in North America’, as the cover term for American English and Canadian English (or, if you prefer this order, Canadian English and American English)?
There were complaints about Wikipedia’s article “Commonwealth English” that there was no such animal. I see it has since been moved to “English in the Commonwealth”.
Ms Maguire’s Facebook post isn’t currently accessible, so I don’t know which tombolo she visited – maybe this one https://www.shetland-heritage.co.uk/st-ninians-isle , which is where I learned the word (with stress on the second syllable).
She goes on to say “We ate lunch at St Ninian’s chapel,” so it must be that one.
In my understanding, the difference between a tombola and bingo is not in the container, but that in bingo, you have to mark the drawn numbers on your bingo sheet, if they happen to be printed on it, and win if you get a row of such numbers, while in a tombola you just check the drawn numbers against your lottery ticket. I guess Americans would call a tombola a raffle?
The word was apparently introduced into English as a technical term on page 189 of F. P. Gulliver (1899) “Shoreline Topography”, Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, vol. 34, available here. It is the work first cited in the OED.
As a recently introduced technical term, I would have expected the Italian pronunciation to have been preserved generally in English. But we can expect variant pronuncations to arise for such a recently introduced, unfamiliar word first encountered only in written texts by many readers. Looking at the pronunciations given in the Wikipedia articles about the sand formation in languages in which stress is relevant, the stress is the first syllable in Catalan, Portuguese, Spanish, Russian, etc.
That’s been my impression – that both refer to informal lotteries with prizes in the garage-sale range rather than ONE MILLION DOLLARS.
In my experience (from British usage, mostly small fetes) a tombola and a raffle are clearly different, in mechanics and ceremonial role.
The raffle is the more prestigious and ceremonious form. Contestants can buy numbered tickets throughout the day; then it ends with the drawing performed onstage (by the master of ceremonies, some relevant dignitary, a chosen small child, or similar) with all contestants watching. A number is drawn and announced for each prize in turn: — “And the skateboard goes to ticket… four hundred and ninety-one.” — and the lucky winners go up to a side table to collect their prizes.
The tombola is much more low-key — no final event, no public ceremony. The prizes have their numbers allotted in advance; as a contestant, you pay your money and then draw (or have drawn for you) your own lots on the spot, then walk away immediately with the corresponding prize, or empty-handed as the case may be. The tombola is economically more interesting: the expected returns on a ticket can change through the day, depending on which prizes happen to have been won earlier. It would, of course, be awfully bad form to let this influence your spending there.
The Cambridge English Dictionary gives stress on the first syllable of “tombolo” for both UK and US pronunciations.
Canadian Geographic featured “tombolo” as the “Geography word of the week” (A. Kylie, 8 March 2016) and appears to show stress on the first syllable.
Curiouser and curiouser!
Usage is Denmark is more or less as @PeterL describes, a tombola gives instant gratification and uses a drum to draw lots from. But it works just fine without the drum, since the organizers can buy sets of numbers on tightly rolled paper that is either crimped on the ends or held by a thin plastic ring so the buyer’s choice is inherently random and the prizes are allocated to numbers in advance. (But the list is usually kept secret so you have to keep track yourself whether that Christmas Turkey is left — unless the organizer uses that as an incentive to buy the last 5 numbers, which does happen).
The raffle will probably be called a tallotteri where you try to buy your lucky number, and the draw is made at a set time. You can also buy the equipment for that.
And then there’s bingo and banko which may be two names for the same thing.
A tombola plays a central role in the plot of Miloš Forman’s movie The Firemen’s Ball (Hoří, má panenko).