The first time most people encounter the word fartlek, they laugh. The second time, they wonder how to actually say it. The third time, they’re usually lacing up their shoes for a workout.
Fartlek is a real word, in regular use by runners, coaches and sports scientists worldwide. It appears in Merriam-Webster. It has an entry in the Oxford English Dictionary. It was once the winning word in a national spelling bee.
Here is exactly what it means, where it comes from and how to say it correctly.
What Does Fartlek Mean?
Fartlek is a Swedish word that means speed play.
It is made up of two parts. The first part, fart, is the Swedish word for speed. The second part, lek, means play or game. Together they form a compound word that Swedish coach Gösta Holmér coined in the late 1930s to describe a new style of running training he had developed.
The full translation is speed play, and that translation is deliberate. Holmér wanted to convey something looser and more intuitive than the structured interval training of the era. His approach was about running hard when you felt like it and easing off when you needed to, using the terrain and your own instincts as a guide. The word play was the point.
How Do You Pronounce Fartlek?
The correct pronunciation is FART-lek.
The first syllable rhymes with “cart” or “start” and is stressed. The second syllable is short and unstressed, rhyming with “deck” in American English or “leck” in British English.
In phonetic notation:
British English: /ˈfɑːtlɛk/ (FART-leck)
American English: /ˈfɑrtlək/ (FART-luhk)
In everyday speech, most runners say FART-lek with equal stress on both syllables, which is close enough. What you want to avoid is putting the emphasis on the second syllable (far-TLEK) or pronouncing the first syllable to rhyme with “art.” The Merriam-Webster pronunciation guide confirms the stressed first syllable in both dialects.
Yes, the first syllable sounds like the English word you are thinking of.
Yes, this is why runners tend to smile the first time they hear it. No, this does not stop it from being taken completely seriously by elite coaches and exercise physiologists around the world.
Where Does the Word Come From?
The word has deeper roots than modern Swedish. Etymologists trace fart back through Middle Low German to Old Saxon and ultimately to the Proto-Germanic root meaning to go or travel. It is a cognate of the English word fare, as in “how did you fare?” and is related to words like ford, ferry and fjord. In Swedish today, fart simply means speed or pace, with no other connotation.
Lek comes from Old Norse leikr, meaning play or game. It is related to the Old Norse verb leika, meaning to play, which is also the ancestor of the English word lark, as in “just for a lark.”
The compound word fartlek appears in English language sources from around 1952, when it began appearing in American athletics coaching publications. The Oxford English Dictionary cites its earliest English evidence from that year in Scholastic Coach magazine. The word was borrowed directly from Swedish with no modification to spelling or meaning.
Who Invented the Word?
Gösta Holmér, Sweden’s national distance running coach from the late 1930s onward, is credited with coining the term. He developed the training method and gave it the name fartlek as a way to describe its philosophy: running that responds to the landscape and the athlete’s energy rather than a fixed plan.
Holmér’s approach was deliberately countercultural at the time. Interval training, which required measured distances and fixed rest periods on a track, was the dominant speed training method. Holmér took his runners into the pine forests outside Stockholm and had them run continuously, mixing fast surges with easy jogging, using trees and hills as their cues rather than stopwatches and lap times.
The method worked quickly. Under Holmér’s guidance, Swedish runners began setting world records. His most famous athletes, Gunder Hägg and Arne Anderson, set six world records for the mile over three years between 1942 and 1945, pushing the record from 4:06.4 down to 4:01.4. Hägg’s remarkable summer of 1942 alone produced ten world records across seven events. Their performances brought international attention to the fartlek method and spread its use to coaches around the world.
Is Fartlek in the Dictionary?
Yes. Fartlek appears in all major English language dictionaries.
Merriam-Webster defines it as “endurance training in which a runner alternates periods of sprinting with periods of jogging.”
The Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary lists it with the note “1940s: from Swedish, from fart ‘speed’ and lek ‘play’.”
Collins English Dictionary defines it as “a method of athletic training using alternate sprinting and jogging.”
The word entered formal English usage in the early 1950s and has been in continuous use in athletics and exercise science literature since then.
Why Does It Sound Funny in English?
Because fart means something very different in English.
In Swedish, fart is a neutral, everyday word meaning speed or velocity. It appears on Swedish road signs (hastighetsgräns means speed limit; fart is used in compound words related to speed and movement). There is nothing remotely humorous about it in its native language.
The collision with the English homophone is purely accidental and entirely linguistic. Swedish and English share ancient Germanic roots, and many Swedish words have unexpected resonance in English. Fartlek happens to be the most notable example.
The humor has not stopped the word from being taken seriously. It appears in peer-reviewed exercise science journals, Olympic coaching manuals, mainstream fitness publications and the New York Times. When Kenyan distance runner Hellen Obiri described racing at a major event, she used fartlek as a technical term without a second thought. The word does its job clearly and efficiently, and runners who use it regularly stop noticing the sound of it within about a week.
What Does Fartlek Mean in Practice?
In training terms, fartlek means a continuous run in which you vary your pace based on feel rather than a fixed structure. You run hard for a stretch, recover at an easy jog, and repeat. The transitions happen when you decide, not when a timer goes off.
The name captures this perfectly. Speed play is exactly what it is. It is not speed work with its connotations of structure and precision. It is not easy jogging with its connotations of steady effort. It is somewhere between the two, governed by instinct, terrain and mood.
That is what Holmér meant when he chose the word. Nearly 90 years later, it still does.
Summary
Fartlek is a Swedish compound word meaning speed play. It is pronounced FART-lek, with stress on the first syllable. It was coined by Swedish running coach Gösta Holmér in the late 1930s to describe a training method that blends continuous running with variable-pace surges based on feel rather than structure.
The word entered English usage in the early 1950s and appears in all major dictionaries. In training, fartlek refers to any run that alternates faster and slower efforts without a fixed schedule.
If you want to know what a fartlek workout actually looks like, start with the complete guide to fartlek training. If you want to try one for the first time, the beginner fartlek workouts page has four sessions you can run this week.
Sources
Oxford English Dictionary. Fartlek, n. Entry updated July 2023.
Merriam-Webster Dictionary. Fartlek. merriam-webster.com.
Online Etymology Dictionary. Fartlek. etymonline.com.
