pitch
/pɪt͡ʃ/ noun, verb, adjective
Forms pitches pitching pitched pitcher pitchest pight
- noun A sticky, gummy substance secreted by trees; tree sap. “It is hard to get this pitch off my hand.”
- noun Anything similar to or derived from tree sap: resin; rosin.
- noun A dark, extremely viscous material still remaining after distilling crude oil or natural tar. “They put pitch on the mast to protect it.”
- noun (geology) Pitchstone.
- verb To cover or smear with pitch.
- verb To darken; to blacken; to obscure.
- adjective Very dark black; pitch-black.
- adjective (of a black color) Intense, deep, dark.
- noun A throw; a toss; a cast, as of something from the hand. “a good pitch in quoits”
- noun (baseball) The act of pitching a baseball. “The pitch was low and inside.”
- noun (sports, UK, Australia, New Zealand) The field on which cricket, soccer, rugby, gridiron or field hockey is played. (In cricket, the pitch is in the centre of the field; see cricket pitch.) (Not often used in the US or Canada, where "field" is the preferred word.) “The teams met on the pitch.”
- noun (golf) A short, high, lofty shot that lands with backspin.
- noun (rare) The field of battle.
- noun An effort to sell or promote something. “He gave me a sales pitch.”
- noun The distance between evenly spaced objects, e.g. the teeth of a saw or gear, the turns of a screw thread, the centres of holes, or letters in a monospace font. “The pitch of pixels on the point scale is 72 pixels per inch.”
- noun The angle at which an object sits. “the pitch of the roof or haystack”
- verb (transitive) To throw. “He pitched the horseshoe.”
- verb (transitive or intransitive, baseball) To throw (the ball) toward a batter at home plate. “The hurler pitched a curveball.”
- verb (intransitive, baseball) To play baseball in the position of pitcher. “Bob pitches today.”
- verb (transitive) To throw away; discard. “He pitched the candy wrapper.”
Synonyms
tar coal tar asphalt bitumen high low jack fling hurl bung cast chuck chunk cook dash dump feck jerk heave hield hoy huck delivery sales talk sales pitch rake slant pitch shot auction pitch lurch pitching flip
Etymology
From Middle English picche, piche, pich, from Old English piċ, from Proto-West Germanic *pik, from Latin pix. Cognate with Ancient Greek πίσσα (píssa, “pitch, tar”), Latin pīnus (“pine”). More at pine. Cognate with Saterland Frisian Pik (“pitch, tar”), Dutch pek (“pitch, tar”), German Low German Pick (“pitch, tar”), German Pech (“pitch, tar”), Catalan pega (“pitch”), Spanish pegar (“to stick, glue”), Franco-Provençal pouatche (“sap from a pine”) and French poix (“sap”). The adjective is probably back-formed from pitch-black, reinterpreting "pitch" as meaning "intense(ly)".
From Middle English picchen, pycchen (“to thrust in, fasten, settle”), from Old English *piċċan, from Proto-West Germanic *pikkijan, a variant of Proto-West Germanic *pikkōn (“to pick, peck”), whence Middle English pikken, picken (“to pick, pierce”), modern English pick.
Unknown. Perhaps from the above sense of "inclination", "level", or "degree", or influenced by it.
Webster’s 1913
- noun A thick, black, lustrous, and sticky substance obtained by boiling down tar. It is used in calking the seams of ships; also in coating rope, canvas, wood, ironwork, etc., to preserve them.
- noun See Pitchstone. Amboyna pitch, the resin of Dammara australis.
- verb To cover over or smear with pitch. Gen. vi. 14.
- verb Fig.: To darken; to blacken; to obscure.
Etymology [See Pitch, n.]
Etymology [OE. picchen; akin to E. pick, pike.]
Sources: Wiktionary · WordNet 3.0 · Webster’s 1913 — from the Wiktionary entry “pitch”, CC BY-SA 4.0. Details