Pitches

How to spell pitches

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce pitches

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does pitches mean?

1. verbThrows something, especially a ball, or sets up and fixes something such as a tent.
2. nounMarked areas of ground prepared for outdoor sports such as football or cricket.
3. nounPersuasive presentations made to win business, customers, or investment.
4. nounThe degrees of highness or lowness of musical sounds.

Pitches in a sentence

• verb

  The bowler pitches the ball faster than anyone in the league.

• noun

  The council maintains six football pitches near the river.

• noun

  The startup founder rehearsed her investor pitches until midnight.

• noun

  The singer struggled to hold the higher pitches during the chorus.

• verb

  Every summer she pitches a tent in the same quiet field.

• noun

  Heavy rain left the cricket pitches waterlogged and unplayable.

Where does pitches come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word carries two distinct histories that happen to share a spelling. The verb sense, meaning to throw or to fix something firmly in place, comes from the Middle English picchen, which meant to thrust in or drive home; from this grew the ideas of pitching a tent (fixing it in the ground) and pitching a ball (throwing it). The separate noun meaning a sticky black tar comes from the Old English pic, itself borrowed early from the Latin pix, meaning the same dark resin used to seal ships and barrels. Over the centuries the throwing verb branched into many everyday uses, giving us the sporting field where a game is fixed and played, the sales talk that is thrown at a listener, and the highness or lowness of a musical tone. The plural and third-person form simply adds -es because the base ends in the soft -ch sound, a regular English rule. The shared spelling is a neat reminder that two unrelated roots, one Germanic verb and one Latin noun, ended up looking identical.

How the word is built

• pitch (Middle English picchen: to thrust, fix, or throw)
• -es (plural noun / third-person singular verb ending)