pitcher

plural pitchers

1. One who pitches (in any sense) anything

   A tent pitcher

   2 more examples

   A pitcher of ideas

   A quoits pitcher

2. ball gamesThe player who delivers the ball to the batter.

   A “pitchometer” was installed on the scoreboard to time the pitchers. According the baseball rules a pitcher had to throw a pitch within 20 seconds after he received the ball from the catcher when there was nobody on base.

   2003, John E. Peterson, The Kansas City Athletics: A Baseball History: 1954–1967, Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, →ISBN, page 210

3. slangA drug dealer.

   To the residents of Spanish Harlem, these pitchers embodied the drug trade at its most sinister; they were the dealers and pushers who were destroying their neighborhood.

   2000, Michael Massing, The Fix, page 67

4. UKobsoleteslangOne who puts counterfeit money into circulation.

   To discover […] how the honest poor are compelled to hob-and-nob with the “shoful pitcher” and the “gun,” it is necessary to visit the vast nursery-grounds of crime.

   1863, Blanchard Jerrold, Signals of Distress in Refuges and Homes of Charity (etc.), page 2

   Synonyms: snide pitcher

5. UScolloquialThe top partner in a homosexual relationship or penetrator in a sexual encounter between two men.

   Synonyms: top

6. obsoleteA sort of crowbar for digging.
7. One who makes a pitch or proposal.

   The pitcher of the new film stands to earn millions.

8. UKobsoleteslangA person who sells anything in the streets.

plural pitchers

1. A wide-mouthed, deep vessel for holding liquids, with a spout or protruding lip and a handle; a water jug or jar with a large ear or handle.

   At length, in a refrigerator, Eve finds a glass pitcher of water, pure, cold, and bright as ever gushed from a fountain among the hills.

   1846, Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The New Adam and Eve”, in Mosses from an Old Manse

2. biologyA tubular or cuplike appendage or expansion of the leaves of certain plants. See pitcher plant.

   Walking into the pitcher on downward pointing hairs, victims slip and drown in the funnel. But this beetle (left) was observed to visit with impunity and even appeared to be scavenging insect bodies from the pitcher.

   1989 May, Uwe George, “Venezuela's Islands in Time”, in National Geographic, volume 175, number 5, page 551

plural pitchers

1. pronunciation spellingPronunciation spelling of picture, representing dialectal English.

   She's purtier'n uh pitcher, son, but what in th' name o' thunderin' snakes c'n you do with 'er in this here country?

   1934, William Byron Mowery, Challenge of the North

   1 more example

   Nineteen sixty-nine, shore as hell, Clay Lawrence —that magazine had uh pitcher of ya—was uh All-American defensive back at the University of Missouri.

   2015, Stephen Gresham, Rockabye Baby

plural Pitchers

1. countableuncountableA surname.
2. A place in the United States:
   1. countableuncountableA township in Cherokee County, Iowa.
   2. countableuncountableA town and hamlet therein, in Chenango County, New York, named after Nathaniel Pitcher.