Bowling

How to spell bowling

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce bowling

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does bowling mean?

1. nounThe game or sport of rolling a ball to knock down pins or to reach a target.
2. nounIn cricket, the action of delivering the ball towards the batsman.

Bowling in a sentence

• We booked a lane at the local bowling alley for Friday night.

• The team relied on fast bowling to take early wickets.

• Her favourite weekend activity is ten-pin bowling with friends.

• His accurate bowling kept the run rate low all afternoon.

Where does bowling come from?

Language of origin: French

The word grows out of bowl in its game sense, which English took from the Old French boule, meaning a ball or rounded object, itself descended from the Latin bulla, originally a bubble and later any small rounded thing. From the late medieval period English speakers used bowl for the heavy wooden balls rolled across grass, and the activity of rolling them came to be called bowling by the sixteenth century. The same Latin bulla also gave us the word bullet, another small round projectile, which is a useful reminder that the core idea here is simply a round thing that rolls. When indoor pin games and the cricketing sense of delivering a ball developed, the established word bowling carried over naturally. The spelling stays regular: it is just the noun bowl plus -ing, with no hidden letters to trip over.

How the word is built

• bowl (rounded ball; to roll a ball)
• -ing (noun/gerund suffix)