My son, during his swimming lessons, is happy to do anything the teacher tells him to do except dive into the water. The word for a dive or plunge is tuffo in Italian.
tuffo
dive / plunge / dip
Tuffo is derived from the verb tuffare (to plunge / immerse), which interestingly enough, comes not from Latin but from the Lombardian *tauff(j)an. Related to tuffare is the reflexive verb tuffarsi, meaning to dive (or literally “to immerse oneself”).
Being a masculine noun, it takes the following definite and indefinite articles:
- il tuffo = the dive
- i tuffi = the dives
- un tuffo = a dive
- dei tuffi = some dives
There are many different kinds of dives in the world of professional diving and swimming, including il tuffo all’indietro (backward dive), il tuffo raggruppato (tuck), il tuffo di testa (head-first dive), il tuffo con avvitamento (twist dive), il tuffo rovesciato (reverse dive) and il tuffo doppio carpiato (pike dive). Tuffo sincronizzato is the name for synchronised diving in Italian.
While you can use tuffarsi to express the verb to dive, it is just as common to use fare un tuffo.
Ha fatto un tuffo in piscina dal trampolino.
He dove into the pool from the diving board.
By extension, tuffo can also refer to a quick dip in a pool or body of water, without necessarily involving diving.
Farò un tuffo veloce in mare prima di tornare a casa.
I’ll take a quick dip in the sea before heading home.
It’s not surprising that tuffo also carries the figurative meaning of jump or leap through time and space. For instance, you can take un tuffo nel passato (a leap into the past) or un tuffo nel vuoto (a jump into the void).
Con un tuffo si buttò sul divano.
With a leap he threw himself onto the sofa.
Tuffo is also used in other contexts, including soccer (e.g. parare in tuffo = to make a diving save) and aeronautics (e.g. scendere in tuffo = nosedive).
Before we move on to the idioms, let’s take a quick look at some terminology that is etymologically related to tuffo:
- tuffatore = male diver
- tuffatrice = female diver
- tuffismo = diving
- tuffetto = little grebe / dabchick (a kind of water bird)
- tuffista = male or female diver
Idiomatic expressions containing ‘tuffo’
Buttarsi / Gettarsi a tuffo su qualcosa
Literal translation: to throw oneself with a leap on something
English meaning: to try and grab something greedily (e.g. sweets, a coin on the ground, an opportunity, etc.)
Sentire un tuffo al cuore
Literal translation: to feel a leap in the heart
English meaning: to feel one’s heart leap, a skipped heartbeat
Heather Broster is a graduate with honours in linguistics from the University of Western Ontario. She is an aspiring polyglot, proficient in English and Italian, as well as Japanese, Welsh, and French to varying degrees of fluency. Originally from Toronto, Heather has resided in various countries, notably Italy for a period of six years. Her primary focus lies in the fields of language acquisition, education, and bilingual instruction.
