What does gondolier mean?
Word: Gondolier
Part of Speech: Noun
Meaning: Gondolier means a person who stands at the back of a gondola, the long flat boat of the canals of Venice, and moves it along with a single oar.
Word origin: Came into English in the early 1600s, through French, from Italian gondoliere, which is built on gondola, the name of the boat.
How do you spell gondolier?
Syllables: gon - do - lier
Tricky part: The middle comes from the boat itself, gondola, so it is dol and not dal. The stress falls at the end of the word, which makes that middle vowel easy to blur.
Watch out for: gondalier, gondollier
Memory tip: A gondolier is the gondola's driver: write the boat's name, drop its final a, and the dol stays exactly as it was.
Gondolier in a sentence
Example 1: The gondolier sang softly as he guided us under a narrow stone bridge.
Example 2: In Venice, a gondolier trains for years before carrying passengers alone.
Example 3: Leo took a photo of a gondolier in a striped shirt and a straw hat.
Fun Fact
Venice issues only a few hundred gondolier licences, and Giorgia Boscolo became the city's first fully licensed female gondolier in 2010.
Practise the CREST Way
Spellacadabra
Choose the correct option to make a meaningful word:
gondol______
a) ear
b) ier
c) eer
d) iere
Show answer
b) ier. The boatman's word ends in ier, as cashier and chandelier do.
Back to the Roots
Choose the correct option:
Gondolier goes back to Italian. Which of these words also comes from Italian?
a) kimono
b) boomerang
c) igloo
d) regatta
Show answer
d) regatta. Regatta first meant a contest in the Venetian dialect of Italian; kimono is Japanese, boomerang comes from an Australian Aboriginal language and igloo from Inuit.
Spell Spies
Choose the pair which has a spelling error:
a) pilot : aircraft
b) gondolier : gondola
c) jockey : racehorse
d) chauffuer : limousine
Show answer
d) chauffuer : limousine. Chauffeur, a French word, puts eu before the r; the other pairs are spelt correctly.
Sound Check
In which word is 'g' pronounced differently?
a) gallery
b) garden
c) gesture
d) gondolier
Show answer
c) gesture. Gesture begins with a j sound, while the others start with the hard g of go.
Multiple Choice Questions
1. Which skill would a gondolier need most?
a) cooking meals for large crowds
b) balancing on a narrow boat
c) repairing the engines of buses
d) reading maps of mountain trails
Show answer
b) balancing on a narrow boat
2. Which person's work is most like a gondolier's?
a) a lighthouse keeper
b) a jockey
c) a ferryman
d) a lifeguard
Show answer
c) a ferryman
