punt

English has three separate words punt. The oldest is punt ‘flat-bottomed boat’ (15^th c.), which comes via middle Low German punte or punto from Latin pontō, a term for a sort of Gaulish boat which also produced English pontoon. Punt ‘bet’ (18^th c.) (better known in the form of the agent noun punter ‘better’, hence ‘customer’) comes from French ponter, a derivative of ponte ‘bet against the banker in certain card games’. This was adapted from Spanish punto ‘point’, a descendant of Latin punctum (source of English point). Punt ‘kick’ (19^th c.) may be a variant of bunt ‘push’ (19^th c.) (now used as a baseball term, meaning ‘hit the ball softly’); this could in turn be an alteration of butt, but it might also come from a Celtic source, related to Breton bounta ‘butt’.