Bats

How to spell bats

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce bats

What does bats mean?

1. nounNocturnal flying mammals with membranous wings.
2. nounWooden or metal clubs used to strike the ball in games such as cricket and baseball.
3. verbTakes a turn at striking the ball in cricket or baseball.
4. adjectiveInformally, mildly mad or eccentric.

Bats in a sentence

• noun

  At dusk the bats poured out of the cave to hunt insects.

• noun

  The team keeps a row of spare cricket bats in the pavilion.

• verb

  She usually bats near the top of the batting order.

• adjective

  The constant noise from the building site is driving me bats.

• noun

  Fruit bats roost upside down in the trees near the river.

• noun

  Aluminium bats are lighter than the old wooden ones.

Where does bats come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The two main meanings of "bat" reach English from quite different roots, and only later ended up spelled identically. The striking implement descends from Old English "batt", meaning a club or cudgel, which may in turn have been reinforced by an Old French "batte" (a beating instrument) from the verb "battre", to beat; this is the bat you swing in cricket or baseball. The flying mammal, by contrast, comes from Middle English "bakke" or "balke", a word of Scandinavian origin related to forms in Old Norse and Danish for the night-fluttering creature, and the final consonant softened into a "t" by the sixteenth century. The informal sense "slightly mad" springs from the older phrase "bats in the belfry", picturing a head full of flitting, disordered creatures. Because "bat" is a short, phonetically regular word, adding the plural or verbal "-s" to make "bats" causes almost no spelling trouble. The chief curiosity is simply that several unrelated histories have all collapsed into one tidy four-letter spelling.

How the word is built

• bat (club, stick / flying mammal)
• -s (plural or third-person singular)