Title Highlight: Webster's Sports Dictionary

Webster's Sports Dictionary

1 volume: Illustrations, Appendices: Abbreviations, Referee Signals, and Scorekeeping

Many of you will watch the Olympics this summer to see athletes in sports ranging from Archery to Yachting compete for gold medals. During the broadcasts, announcers often use sport specific terms to describe the action; for instance when watching fencing, you might hear the terms ”cutover”, “feint” or “en garde” used. During a table tennis match, you may hear that a player holds his/her “bat” in a “pen hold” style. The explanations for these and other terms used in many other sports are found and illustrated in this dictionary. Along with the descriptions of terms used to explain the action, there are also brief descriptions of many sports, not only those found in the Olympics, but those of other disciplines as well.

It is interesting to note that the same term may have different meanings depending upon the sport. For example the term “balk” is not only used in baseball, but also in racquet sports and to describe an area on a billiard or snooker table. Some of the definitions are quite extensive; the term “ball” not only has illustrations and written descriptions of different types of balls used in different sports, but also has a table giving the size of the ball in circumference and diameter, its weight and construction materials.

The abbreviations appendix gives explanations of some of the many sports shorthand terms you may hear or read in sports articles. The referee signals appendix illustrates the signals used by referees in the sports of American football, basketball and ice hockey. The scorekeeping section introduces two lost arts in these days of electronic recordkeeping; how to fill out a baseball scorecard and how to manually score bowling.