Bat

How to spell bat

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce bat

What does bat mean?

1. nounA small flying nocturnal mammal with membranous wings.
2. nounA shaped wooden or metal implement used to strike a ball in games such as cricket or baseball.
3. verbTo strike at a ball with a bat, or to take a turn at batting.

Bat in a sentence

• noun

  A bat flew out of the old barn at dusk.

• noun

  He gripped the bat and waited for the next delivery.

• verb

  The captain decided to bat first after winning the toss.

• noun

  A single bat left the cave to hunt insects at dusk.

• noun

  The cricketer chose a heavier bat for the final match.

• verb

  Younger players often bat near the end of the order.

Where does bat come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The flying mammal sense of bat comes from a curious spelling accident. Middle English had the form bakke, borrowed from a Scandinavian source related to Old Norse words for the creature, and that older form survived in dialect for centuries. By the 1500s the final consonant had drifted and the word was being written as bat, possibly through confusion with Latin blatta, a word for moths and other night-flying insects. The sporting and striking sense has a quite separate ancestry: it descends from Old English batt, meaning a cudgel or stout stick, which may in turn owe something to Celtic words for a staff or club. Because two unrelated words happened to collapse into the same three letters, modern English ends up using bat both for the animal you might see at dusk and for the wooden implement you swing at a ball.

How the word is built

• bat (single root; no prefix or suffix)