Word.ws English Dictionary

tunnelball

tunnelball noun: a children's game in which players stand in line with their feet apart, making a tunnel with their legs, down which the lead player propels a ball back to the last player, who runs with it to the front of the line and repeats; played competitively between teams for speed, or by a single team for recreation or exercise.

Noun

tunnelball (uncountable)

  1. (Australia, UK) A children's game in which players stand in line with their feet apart, making a tunnel with their legs, down which the lead player propels a ball back to the last player, who runs with it to the front of the line and repeats; played competitively between teams for speed, or by a single team for recreation or exercise.
    • They run the sports for ten days. This includes weightlifting, football, tennis, table tennis, cards, scrabble, chess, draughts, darts, quoits, volleyball, baseball, frisbee tossing, tunnelball, scramble ball, the piggyback race, the egg and spoon race, target handball, the spit the dummy contest...1994, Mark Brandon “Chopper” Read, Chopper 4: For the Term of His Unnatural Life, 2012, Pan Macmillan Australia, unnumbered page
    • I went along to my children′s sports day and found myself cheering madly at the tunnelball games and when they played Chariots of Fire over the running races – it was all I could do not to get up and break the record for the four minute mile myself.2006, Sonia Neale, Bad Mother′s Revenge, HarperCollins Australia, unnumbered page

Origin of tunnelball

From tunnel + ball.

Questions about tunnelball

What does tunnelball mean?
Tunnelball means a children's game in which players stand in line with their feet apart, making a tunnel with their legs, down which the lead player propels a ball back to the last player, who runs with it to the front of the line and repeats; played competitively between teams for speed, or by a single team for recreation or exercise.
What part of speech is tunnelball?
Tunnelball is a noun.

Words near tunnelball in the dictionary

  1. tunnel stern
  2. tunnel sterns
  3. tunnel vision
  4. tunnel-visioned
  5. tunnelable
  6. tunnelball
  7. tunneled
  8. tunneler
  9. tunnelers
  10. tunnelful
  11. tunnelfuls

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: tunnelball (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.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-au-tunnelball.ogg.

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