Wicket

How to spell wicket

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce wicket

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does wicket mean?

1. nounIn cricket, the set of three stumps and two bails the bowler aims at, or a batsman's dismissal.
2. nounA small gate or door, especially one set within or beside a larger one.
3. nounA small window or hatch where a customer is served, such as at a bank or ticket office.

Wicket in a sentence

• The fast bowler shattered the wicket with his very first delivery.

• She unlatched the garden wicket and walked up the path.

• The clerk slid the documents back through the wicket at the bank.

• The home team lost a wicket in the final over of the day.

• A narrow wicket in the great wooden door let visitors enter the abbey.

• Customers lined up at the wicket to collect their parcels.

Where does wicket come from?

Language of origin: French

This word came into English in the early 1200s from Anglo-Norman and Old Northern French wiket, meaning a small gate or a hatch set inside a larger door. The French form is usually traced back to a Germanic root related to the idea of turning or giving way, the same notion seen in old words for something that yields or swings aside, since a wicket is a little opening that turns on a hinge to let one person through. From the literal small gate, English speakers stretched the sense in several directions: a low gate in a fence, a serving hatch or pay window, and, by the eighteenth century, the cricketing apparatus of three upright stumps topped by bails, perhaps because the original target really did look like a little gate. The spelling has stayed remarkably stable for eight centuries, keeping the single c and the doubled internal sound spelled -ck-, which is the part that trips writers who expect a fancier ending. Because the word is so old and so plain, it never picked up the silent letters or Latin endings that complicate its contemporaries.

How the word is built

• wicket (a small gate or hatch; later the cricket stumps), a single unanalysable root borrowed whole from Old Northern French