Pitch

How to spell pitch

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce pitch

What does pitch mean?

1. verbTo throw or toss something, often with care or aim.
2. nounA persuasive speech or presentation aimed at selling or promoting something.
3. nounThe perceived height or depth of a musical note or sound.
4. nounA marked area of ground for playing a sport such as football or cricket.
5. nounA thick, dark, sticky substance derived from tar or resin, used for sealing and waterproofing.
6. verbTo set up or erect something, especially a tent or camp.

Pitch in a sentence

• verb

  The volunteers will pitch the sandbags onto the truck.

• noun

  The startup founder rehearsed her pitch for the investors.

• noun

  The singer held the high note at perfect pitch.

• noun

  The groundsman watered the pitch before the match.

• noun

  Workers spread hot pitch across the flat roof to seal it.

• verb

  They decided to pitch the tent near the river before dark.

Where does pitch come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Pitch is really two old words that collapsed into one spelling. The oldest is the sticky black sense, which comes from Old English 'pic', borrowed early from Latin 'pix' (genitive 'picis'), meaning the tar or resin used to seal ships and roofs. The other branch is the verb meaning to thrust, fix, or throw, which appears in Middle English as 'picchen'; its earlier roots are uncertain, but it carried the idea of driving something firmly into place, as when you fix a tent peg into the ground. From that fixing sense grew the notions of setting up a camp, of an angle or slope (how a roof is 'fixed' at a steepness), and of hurling or aiming something, which gave us both the cricketing and baseball throw and the modern 'sales pitch'. The musical meaning, the height or depth of a sound, also developed from this idea of where a note is set or fixed. The 'tch' spelling, like in 'match' and 'catch', simply reflects the short vowel before the ch sound, so the word looks harder than it sounds.

How the word is built

• pitch (single root; Middle English picchen 'to thrust or fix', and Old English pic 'tar' from Latin pix)