Bookmaker

Part of speech: noun

Pronunciation: /ˈbʊkmeɪkɚ/

Definitions

1. A person who takes wagers on outcomes of events and regulates the associated financial transactions
2. An individual responsible for establishing betting odds and handling the payouts and receipts from bets placed on events
3. An individual who accepts bets on various events while managing the odds and payouts involved in those wagers

Etymology: Bookmaker began as a plain compound of "book" and "maker", and the earliest form, Middle English "bokmakere", meant someone who made books in the literal sense of writing or producing them. The gambling sense came later, from the phrase "make book" or "make a book", which described a person taking wagers and recording them in a ledger. That phrase was in use in nineteenth-century England, and the record-keeping it describes is exactly what gave the word its new meaning. The surprise lies in the gap between the two senses. A medieval "bokmakere" was a scribe or bookmaker in the craft sense, while the modern bookmaker keeps no literary product at all, only a list of bets and odds. The ledger, a physical book of accounts, is the thread connecting them, so the gambling sense is in a way a return to the book's older business of recording things.

Synonyms: bookie, wagering agent, odds maker, gambler, betting agent