Etymology

baseball

B3A1S1E1B3A1L1L1

Today it means: A sport common in North America, the Caribbean, and East Asia, in which the objective is to strike a ball so that one of a nine-person team can run counter-clockwise among four bases, resulting in the scoring of a run. The team with the most runs after termination of play, usually nine innings, wins. Full definition →

English ball ← Middle English bal ← Old English *beall
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The story

  1. Proto-Indo-European*gʷem-
  2. Proto-Indo-European*gʷémtis
  3. Proto-Hellenic*gʷə́tis
  4. Ancient Greekβᾰ́σῐς (bắsĭs)
  5. Latinbasis
  6. Old Frenchbase
  7. Middle Englishbase
  8. Englishbase
  9. Proto-Indo-European*bʰel-
  10. Proto-Germanic*balluz
  11. Old English*beall
  12. Middle Englishbal
  13. Englishball
  14. English todaybaseball

From base + ball.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.