Word.ws English Dictionary

gossima

gossima noun: a precursor to table tennis, played with hard rubber balls.

Noun

gossima (uncountable)

  1. A precursor to table tennis, played with hard rubber balls.
    • Already we've seen early hallmarks of the twentieth century: colonial decay, cultural appropriation, and competing trademarks. Next up was the rise of the immigrant underclass. World War I shattered the gossima delusions of the aristocracy, and the Great Depression humbled the rest.2010, Roger Bennett, Eli Horowitz, Everything You Know Is Pong, Harper Collins, →ISBN, page 4
    • In fact table tennis was also called gossima in the early days, and, given that Gossamer is the brand name of a condom, the Mayor of London missed out on an even better joke, perhaps calculating that the Chinese wouldn't get it.[2010 July 17, Howard Jacobson, “Whiff! Whaff! The beautiful game may be coming home”, in The Independent, retrieved 24 Nov 2020

Origin of gossima

From Gossima, a trademark registered by Jacques on 16 July 1891 (trademark number 157,615).

Questions about gossima

What does gossima mean?
Gossima means a precursor to table tennis, played with hard rubber balls.
What part of speech is gossima?
Gossima is a noun.

Words near gossima in the dictionary

  1. Gossetts
  2. gosshawk
  3. gosshawks
  4. gossib
  5. gossibs
  6. gossima
  7. Gossington
  8. gossip
  9. gossip mill
  10. gossip mills
  11. gossip mirror

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: gossima (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “gossima.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/gossima. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.