Baseball

How to spell baseball

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce baseball

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does baseball mean?

1. nounA bat-and-ball game played between two teams of nine players who score runs by hitting and circling four bases.

Baseball in a sentence

• The children spent the whole afternoon playing baseball in the park.

• He collects vintage baseball cards from the 1950s.

Where does baseball come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a transparent English compound joining 'base' and 'ball', but each half has a long history. 'Base' arrived through Old French from the Latin basis, itself borrowed from Greek, where it meant a 'step', 'pedestal', or 'foundation'; in the game it names the fixed stations a runner must touch. 'Ball' is the older, native element, descending from a Germanic root for a round object that is related to words like 'bowl' and to the Old Norse boellr. The two words were stitched together in the early 1800s to name the bat-and-ball sport that developed in North America, and the term first appears in print in that period. Because both parts are common everyday words, the compound is spelled exactly as it sounds, which makes it an easy word to write.

How the word is built

• base (a station on the field, from Latin basis: foundation)
• ball (round object, from Germanic)