A piece of sports equipment made of fabric stretched tightly across a frame that bounces you up into the air when you jump on it.
Trampoline comes from Spanish 'trampolín,' which came from Italian 'trampolino,' ultimately from Latin 'trampallus' (a type of board or plank). The word traveled through Mediterranean languages before reaching English in the 1700s.
Trampolines became an Olympic sport, but they were originally invented to help acrobats train for aerial stunts—the physics of bouncing involves storing energy in the stretched fabric and releasing it explosively, which is the same principle as springs.
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