Softball

How to spell softball

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce softball

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does softball mean?

1. nounA bat-and-ball team game similar to baseball, played with a larger, softer ball pitched underarm.
2. nounAn easy or undemanding question, especially one asked to give someone a simple opportunity to respond.

Softball in a sentence

• The office team plays softball in the park every summer.

• The reporter lobbed an obvious softball at the candidate instead of pressing for details.

• She pitched for her college softball league for three seasons.

• That interview was full of softball questions that let the executive look good.

Where does softball come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a straightforward English compound, joining 'soft', which descends from the Old English sōfte meaning 'gentle, mild, or not hard', with 'ball', the name for a round object used in play that came into English partly from Old Norse böllr and partly from Old French. The two words have lived in English for many centuries on their own, but they were welded together only late, in the United States around the 1920s, to name a bat-and-ball game closely related to baseball but played with a larger, softer ball on a smaller field. Earlier the game went by a string of other names, including indoor baseball, kitten ball, and mush ball, before 'softball' settled in as the standard term. Because the spelling is simply the two familiar words run together, the only real trap is remembering it is one solid word rather than two; the 'ft' cluster carries over directly from 'soft'.

How the word is built

• soft (Old English sōfte: gentle, not hard)
• ball (round object used in games)