/ˈpɛnənt/
[noun] A long, narrow, triangular flag used on ships, by sports teams, or as a symbol of championship or victory. It can also refer to the title or honour of winning a sports league or competition.
A pennant is secretly two different flags that sailors and sports fans accidentally merged into one word.
The story of 'pennant' begins with a piece of cloth flying at the top of a ship's mast, and it turns out the word itself is a kind of flag — made from two different words stitched together. The most direct ancestor is the Old French word 'pendant', meaning 'hanging thing', which came from the Old French verb 'pendre', meaning 'to hang'. This in turn descended from the Latin verb 'pendere', meaning 'to hang' or 'to weigh', a root that was extraordinarily productive in English. The same Latin root gave us 'pendant' (via Old French pendant → English pendant), 'pendulum' (via Latin pendulum → English pendulum), and even 'pension' (via Latin pensionem → Old French pension → English pension), since a pension was originally a 'hanging' or 'weighing out' of money.
The earliest form of the word in English was 'pennon', which arrived in the 14th century directly from Old French 'penon', meaning a long, narrow flag attached to a lance or carried in battle. 'Penon' itself came from the Old French word 'penne', meaning 'feather' or 'quill', which descended from Latin 'penna', also meaning 'feather'. The connection is visual and immediate — a narrow flag streaming in the wind looks exactly like a long feather. This same Latin 'penna' gave English the word 'pen' (via Latin penna → Old French penne → Middle English pen), because the first writing instruments were made from large feathers with sharpened quills.
So as the 17th century arrived, English sailors were using both 'pennon' for their narrow lance flags and 'pendant' for the long hanging banners from their masts. The two words, so similar in sound and meaning, began to blur together in sailors' speech. By around 1650, the blended form 'pennant' had appeared — carrying the 'penn-' from 'pennon' and the '-ant' ending from 'pendant'. It was a perfectly natural collision, the kind of linguistic accident that happens when similar-sounding words describe similar-looking things in the same working environment.
At sea, the pennant became a precise and important symbol. Different shapes and colours of pennants were used to signal rank, identity, and orders between ships. A long, tapering pennant known as a 'commissioning pennant' was flown continuously on a warship to show that it was an active vessel of the Royal Navy. These naval traditions spread across the world wherever British ships sailed, and the word 'pennant' sailed with them.
In American English, the word took on a bold new life in the world of sport. By the late 19th century, baseball leagues began awarding a pennant — a physical triangular flag — to the team that won the league championship. Over time, 'winning the pennant' became shorthand for winning the league itself, even as the actual flags became less central to the ceremony. Today, fans hang triangular pennants on their walls to show loyalty to their team, decorative descendants of those ancient battle flags that once streamed from the lances of medieval knights, which were themselves named after the feathers they resembled.