Cricketer

How to spell cricketer

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce cricketer

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does cricketer mean?

1. nounA person who plays the game of cricket, especially as a profession or for a team.

Cricketer in a sentence

• The young cricketer scored a century in his first match for the county.

• She became the most successful cricketer in the national women's team.

Where does cricketer come from?

Language of origin: Dutch

This is an agent noun formed inside English by adding the suffix -er, meaning 'one who does', to the name of the game cricket. The game's own name first appears in English in the sixteenth century, and its ultimate source is genuinely uncertain. The leading idea traces it to Middle Dutch or Flemish words such as 'krick' or 'krickstoel', meaning a stick or a low stool, brought over through close trade contact between south-east England and the Low Countries; a rival suggestion points to the Old French 'criquet', a kind of stick or post used as a target in a ball game. Whatever the original object was, the sense settled on the bat-and-ball game played on a pitch, and by the eighteenth century 'cricketer' was the natural word for someone who plays it. Note that the game word ends in a single 't', so the spelling keeps just one 't' before the -er ending, never doubling it.

How the word is built

• cricket (the bat-and-ball game)
• -er (agent suffix: one who does)