Cricket Terms for US Sports Fans: A Glossary

The problem with cricket commentary is not that the words are unfamiliar. It is that too many of them are familiar and wrong. A first-time American viewer hears pitch, field, strike, out, run and innings within the first minute, understands every one of them, and is misled by five of the six. Then somebody puts a fielder at deep backward square leg and the illusion of comprehension collapses entirely.

This is a vocabulary page rather than a rules page. It does not explain how cricket works — the guide to cricket's rules for American readers does that, and the baseball-fan translation handles the analogies. This one goes term by term, grouped by where in a broadcast you will hear each set, so that you can look up the phrase that just confused you.

The false friends

These are the words shared with American sport that do not mean what you expect.

Term	What it means in cricket
Wicket	Three separate things: the set of three stumps; a dismissal ("he took three wickets"); and the prepared strip in the middle ("a slow wicket")
Pitch	The strip of prepared ground between the two sets of stumps. Never a delivery — nobody pitches a ball
Field	Used as a verb, meaning to be the side not batting. The whole playing area is the ground
Innings	Always spelled and pronounced with the s, singular and plural alike. One innings, two innings. Never an inning
Over	Six consecutive deliveries from one bowler, after which another bowler operates from the other end. It is a unit of bowling, not a unit of the match like a baseball inning
Strike	The batter facing the bowling is "on strike"; the other is the non-striker. Nothing to do with a called strike
Out	A dismissal, and once you are out your innings is finished for good. There is no next at-bat
Run	A single unit of scoring, made by the two batters running past each other between the wickets, or awarded for a boundary
Bowl	What the bowler does. He does not throw — an illegal action is literally called a throw and is penalised

The one that causes the most confusion in practice is wicket, because a commentator will use all three senses inside a single sentence and expect you to keep up.

Fielding positions and the logic behind them

The names look arbitrary and are not. Every one is built from three pieces of information, and once you know the system you can decode a position you have never heard.

The first piece is which side of the ground. Imagine the batter standing ready: the side the bat is on is the off side, the side the legs are on is the leg side, sometimes called the on side. Because this is defined by the batter's stance, the off side swaps to the other half of the ground when a left-hander comes in.

The second piece is whether the fielder is in front of or behind the batter. Forward and backward do this job — forward square leg is ahead of the batter, backward square leg behind.

The third piece is distance: silly and short mean unusually close, deep or long mean near the boundary.

With that, the standard names:

• Slip, and second, third and fourth slip — a diagonal line of catchers behind the batter on the off side, waiting for an edge. Gully sits at the wide end of that line.
• Point and cover — square of the batter on the off side, guarding the drive.
• Mid-off and mid-on — straightish, either side of the bowler, at catching-to-medium depth.
• Midwicket — square-ish on the leg side.
• Square leg — directly beside the batter on the leg side. The umpire who is not standing at the bowler's end usually stands here, and is called the square-leg umpire.
• Fine leg and long leg — behind the batter on the leg side, fine meaning close to straight behind.
• Third man — behind the batter on the off side, out towards the boundary.
• Long-off and long-on — the boundary versions of mid-off and mid-on.
• Silly point and short leg — suicidally close positions used against spin, occupied by the youngest member of the side.

There is no rule requiring any of these positions to be filled. A captain has nine fielders plus a wicketkeeper and places them wherever the plan requires, which is why the arrangement changes between deliveries.

Kinds of bowler

Every bowler is described by two things: pace, and how they get the ball to deviate.

Fast bowlers — also quicks, or pacemen — bowl at the top speeds and rely on pace, bounce and movement. Fast-medium and medium-pace describe the steps below. A seamer moves the ball off the pitch using the raised seam; a swing bowler moves it in the air. Conventional swing happens with a newer ball; reverse swing happens with an old one and moves the opposite way, which is why the condition of the ball is discussed so obsessively.

Spinners turn the ball by imparting revolutions with the fingers or the wrist, bowling much slower. The four main categories:

Type	Hand and method	Direction of turn to a right-handed batter
Off-spin	Right arm, fingers	In towards the batter, from the off side
Leg-spin	Right arm, wrist	Away from the batter, from the leg side
Left-arm orthodox	Left arm, fingers	Away from the batter
Left-arm wrist spin	Left arm, wrist	In towards the batter

Left-arm wrist spin was for decades called by an older term that has now largely fallen out of use in commentary; the descriptive name is the one you will hear on a current broadcast.

Deliveries with names of their own

• Yorker — a ball pitched right at the batter's feet, aimed to slide under the bat. The most valuable delivery in the closing overs of a limited-overs match.
• Bouncer — a short-pitched ball that rises at the batter's head or chest.
• Full toss — a ball that reaches the batter without pitching. Usually a mistake. Above waist height it is illegal.
• Half-volley — pitched just short of the batter's reach, the easiest ball to drive.
• Googly — bowled by a leg-spinner, out of the back of the hand so it turns the opposite way to the stock ball. The most famous deception in the game.
• Doosra — the off-spinner's equivalent, turning away from the right-hander instead of into them.
• Carrom ball — flicked out between thumb and a bent middle finger, named after the board game.
• Slower ball — a fast bowler's disguised change of pace.
• Arm ball — a spinner's delivery that goes straight on with the arm rather than turning.
• Long hop — a badly short spinner's ball that sits up to be hit.

Dismissals as you will hear them called

There are ten ways of being out in the Laws, but the vocabulary used to describe them is what trips up new viewers.

• Bowled — the ball hits the stumps. Commentators say "cleaned him up" or "through the gate" if it went between bat and pad.
• Caught — a fielder catches it before it touches the ground. Caught behind means the wicketkeeper took it, off an edge.
• LBW — leg before wicket, where the ball strikes the batter's body and would have hit the stumps. The most argued-about dismissal in the game.
• Run out — the fielding side breaks the wicket while a batter is out of the crease during a run.
• Stumped — the keeper breaks the wicket while the batter is out of the crease but not attempting a run.
• Hit wicket — the batter knocks their own stumps over.
• Played on — a version of bowled where the ball comes off the bat first. Also "dragged it back on".
• Golden duck — out for nought on the first ball faced. A plain duck is out for nought at all. Both come from the shape of the zero.
• Nightwatchman — not a dismissal but you will hear it near one: a lower-order batter sent in late in the day to protect a better player until the next morning.

Two phrases you will hear that are not dismissals: maiden over, an over from which no runs are scored, and carrying his bat, said of an opener who is still not out when all ten wickets have fallen.

Reading the score

This is where American viewers most often lose the thread, because two conventions exist and broadcasters do not always announce which they are using.

A team's score is given as runs and wickets. In England and much of the world it is written runs first — 250/4 or 250 for 4 means two hundred and fifty runs for the loss of four wickets, with six wickets left. In Australia the convention is reversed, so the same position is written 4/250. Both are correct in their own market, and a broadcast covering an away series may use either.

Bowling figures are always written wickets first: 4/32 or 4-32 means the bowler has taken four wickets while conceding thirty-two runs. So the same pair of numbers means opposite things depending on whether it belongs to a team or a bowler, and the only way to tell is context.

On a scorecard, the shorthand for how each batter was dismissed sits beside their name — c Smith b Jones for caught by Smith bowled by Jones, lbw b Jones, st Smith b Jones for stumped, run out, and not out or an asterisk against the score for a batter still in. DNB means did not bat.

A required run rate or the target on screen tells the chasing side how many runs per over they need. In rain-affected limited-overs matches the target is recalculated by a formula, and the revised figure is what the scoreboard shows.

The numbers people quote

Milestone vocabulary, kept brief because the arithmetic is handled in the guide to cricket versus baseball statistics.

• Century — an individual score of one hundred or more. A half-century is fifty or more, a double century two hundred.
• Five-for or five-wicket haul — five wickets in an innings by one bowler. A ten-for across a two-innings match.
• Strike rate — for a batter, runs per hundred balls faced; for a bowler, balls per wicket taken. Same phrase, two definitions.
• Economy rate — runs conceded per over by a bowler. Lower is better.
• Hat-trick — three wickets in three consecutive deliveries by the same bowler. The term originated in cricket before it travelled to other sports.

Formats and competitions

Finally, the proper nouns. Test cricket is the five-day international format, played in whites with a red ball. ODI is the fifty-over one-day international. T20 is twenty overs a side; T20I is the international version. The Hundred is an English competition using a hundred balls per side rather than overs, covered in the guide to the competition.

Among the competitions an American viewer will meet first: Major League Cricket at home, the Indian Premier League as the biggest franchise tournament in the sport, the T20 World Cup as the global short-format event the United States has now played in, and the Ashes as the England–Australia Test rivalry that half the commentary you hear will reference regardless of who is playing.

For working out where to find any of it, see how to watch cricket in the USA; for players worth following while the vocabulary settles, the guide to cricketers to watch as a new fan; and if you decide to play, the gear buying guide uses most of these words in a shop context. The rest of the game in this country is at the cricket in the USA hub.

Sources and method

Definitions of dismissals, deliveries, the over, the pitch and the terms fixed by the rules of the game follow the Laws of Cricket as published by the Marylebone Cricket Club, which is the governing document for terminology as well as for play. Fielding position names, bowling classifications and scorecard notation are long-established conventions of the game rather than rules, and are described here as they are used in current broadcast and print coverage.

This page defines terms; it does not attempt to state records, statistics or numerical thresholds beyond the definitions themselves, and the arithmetic behind the statistical vocabulary is covered on a separate page rather than duplicated here. Where usage is contested or changing — as with the naming of left-arm wrist spin — that is noted rather than resolved. Regional differences in score notation are described as differences rather than as one convention being correct.