Scorer

How to spell scorer

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce scorer

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does scorer mean?

1. nounA player who achieves points or goals in a game or competition.
2. nounA person who keeps the official record of points or runs during a match.

Scorer in a sentence

• He finished the season as the league's top scorer.

• The cricket scorer noted every run in the leather-bound book.

• The striker is a reliable scorer from close range.

• A careful scorer never loses track of the running total.

Where does scorer come from?

Language of origin: Old Norse

The base word score comes from the Old Norse skor, meaning a notch, cut, or incision, and from the related Old English scoru, which curiously meant the number twenty. The link makes sense once you picture how counting was once done: tallies were cut into a wooden stick, and every twentieth notch marked off a full group, so a 'score' came to mean both the notch itself and a count of twenty. From keeping a running tally on a stick, the verb 'to score' grew to mean recording points in a game and then actively winning those points. The agent ending -er, an old and productive English suffix meaning 'a person who does the thing', was added to give scorer, 'one who scores'. The same notch-cutting ancestry survives in relatives such as 'shear' and 'scar', which all trace back to the idea of cutting.

How the word is built

• score (to record points or mark a tally)
• -er (agent suffix: one who does)