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Ball

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For other uses, see Ball (disambiguation).

Images

Balls are usually hollow and spherical but can be other shapes, such as ovoid (only in a few special cases) or solid (as in billiards). In most games using balls, the play of the game follows the state of the ball as it is hit, kicked, or thrown by players. Balls can also be used for solitary activities such as juggling.


These games can be grouped by the general objective of the game, sometimes indicating a common origin either of a game itself or of its basic idea:

Popular ball games around the world include:

Football and Gaelic sanctioned by the AFL and GAA.

Phrases

  • The purpose of playing with a ball or ball substitute such as the shuttlecock is that the focus of the game is the ball and not the opposing players. The phrase play the ball not the man comes to mind.
  • behind the eight ball, at a disadvantage or in a baffling situation
  • ball and chain, a. something that severely restricts one's activity usually oppressively (sometimes used to refer to marriage). b. slang: wife
  • ball hawk, one skillful in taking the ball away from opponents (as in basketball or football)
  • on the ball, alert, active, or attentive; on top of things

Etymology

The first known use of the word ball in English in the sense of a globular body that is played with was in 1205 in Template:Latinx in the phrase, "Template:Latinx" The word came from the Middle English bal (inflected as ball-e, -es in turn from Old Norse böllr (pronounced [bɔllr]; compare Old Swedish baller, and Swedish båll) from Proto-Germanic ballu-z, (whence probably Middle High German bal, ball-es, Middle Dutch bal), a cognate with Old High German ballo, pallo, Middle High German balle from Old Teutonic ballon (weak masculine), and Old High German ballâ, pallâ, Middle High German balle, Old Teutonic ballôn (weak feminine). No Old English representative of any of these is known. (The answering forms in Old English would have been beallu, -a, -e -- compare bealluc, ballock.) If ball- was native in Teutonic, it may have been a cognate with the Latin foll-is in sense of a "thing blown up or inflated." In the later Middle English spelling balle the word coincided graphically with the French balle "ball" and "bale", which has hence been erroneously assumed to be its source.

See also

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