Modern seesaws have springs for safer play.

A set of playground seesaws.

Makeshift seesaws are used for acrobatics.

A seesaw (also known as a teeter-totter or teeter board) is a long, narrow board pivoted in the middle so that, as one end goes up, the other goes down.

In a playground setting, the board is balanced in the exact center. A person sits on each end and they take turns pushing their feet against the ground to lift their end into the air. Playground seesaws usually have handles for the riders to grip as they sit facing each other. One problem with the seesaw's design is that if a child allows himself/herself to hit the ground suddenly after jumping, or exits the seesaw at the bottom, the other child may fall and be injured. For this reason, seesaws are often mounted above a soft surface such as foam or wood chips.

Seesaws, and the eagerness of children to play with them, are sometimes used to aid in mechanical processes. For example, at the Gaviotas community in Colombia, a children's seesaw is connected to a water pump.

In the United States a seesaw is also called a "teeter-totter". However, most commonly a "teeter-totter" is a two-person swing on a swing set, on which two children sit facing each other and the teeter-totter swings back and forth in a pendulum motion. According to linguist Peter Trudgill, this term originates from the Norfolk language word tittermatorter. Both teeter-totter (from teeter, as in to teeter on the edge) and seesaw (from the verb saw) demonstrate the linguistic process called reduplication, where a word or syllable is doubled, often with a different vowel. Reduplication is typical of words that indicate repeated activity, such as riding up and down on a seesaw.^[1]:

The outdoor toy usually called a seesaw has a number of regional names, New England having the greatest variety in the smallest area. In southeast New England it can be referred to as a tilt or a tilting board. Speakers in northeast Massachusetts have been known to call it a teedle board; in the Narragansett Bay area the term changes to dandle or dandle board. These regional names are not very common, and have become antiquated. Children call it a seesaw more likely than not in Massachusetts. Teeter or teeterboard is used more generally in the northeast United States, while teeter-totter, probably the most common term after seesaw, is used across the inland northern states and westward to the West Coast.^[1]

Mechanically, a seesaw is a first class lever. The simple mechanics of a seesaw make them appear frequently in school exam paper questions on mechanical problems. Some of the physics of seesaws are very simple. If you were to take the seesaws base board, and increase it one way, the side with more of the board on it would need less weight in order to tip that way, the side with a smaller amount of the board would need more weight in order to tip that way, and vise versa. On a seesaw you would put two people on either side and the heavier person would go down, and the lighter person would go up. In order for the lighter person to go down, the heavier person would need to let go some of the weight keeping them down in order to let the them go up. These are all very simple concepts of physics. Seesaws show a very simple way of physics and is a very easy way to first demonstrate physics to the youth of the newest generation.

[edit] References

1. ^ ^{a b} teeter-totter listing in TheFreeDictionary.com