Gymnasium

A Gymnasium is a large room which could be used for many different indoor sports.

Types of gymnasiums

A large room which could be used for many different indoor sports. The majority of gymnasiums in the world are actually part of Schools, sports halls or sports centre, and typically these places are designed to cater for lots of different sports, with markings on the floor for playing indoor basketball, volleyball, badminton, 5-a-side soccer etc.

A place where you do gymnastics would probably be called a gymnasium

but even then, a gymnastics place is typically a multipurpose sports arena.

Tagging

Various tags to be aware of:

• leisure=sports_hall - A large single room that is used as a sports hall, in a building or part of a building.
• leisure=sports_centre - Gymnasiums normally form parts of sports centres of some sort.
• sport=* - Used to identify one or more sports which can be played within or on some physical feature
• sport=gymnastics - where the sport of gymnastics is practiced. Note however that gymnastics is rarely the only type of sport to be practiced in a particular gymnasium.
• leisure=pitch - area designed for playing a particular sport, normally designated with appropriate markings. This tag can be used for indoor courts. As such a gymnasium might often be tagged with this, and then the various sport=x;y;z sports which can be played in this gymnasium
• amenity=dojo - A formal training place for any of the Japanese do arts

"Gym" confusion

See Gym / Fitness centre for fitness centres. The word "Gym" is originally a shortening of Gymnasium of course. However the modern use of the word gym (the most prevalent parlance across US, UK, & Australia) is more about gym as in fitness centre. We are less likely to be talking about a gymnasium. In any case, for tagging purposes the word "gym" is best avoided because of this ambiguity.

For added confusion "Gymnasium" in German and Scandinavian languages is a type of secondary school. That's also not what this page is about! (See Education features) (In ancient Greece, a gymnasium such as The Academy combined both physical and general education, different parts of Europe and its languages then adopted the word for either of the two uses).