cricket
Pluralcrickets
Pluralcrickets
Formscrickets, cricketing, cricketed
- 1An insect of the order Orthoptera, especially the family Gryllidae, whose males make a chirping sound by rubbing their forewings together.
A cricket somewhere behind the stove chirped all night long.
Pet stores sell live crickets as food for lizards and frogs.
Note
The insect is named for its noise: Old French criket is a diminutive of criquer, "to make a cracking sound; creak", which goes back to Middle Dutch kricken, "to creak", so the name means something like a little creaker. The game and the footstool only share its spelling; each comes from a separate word with a history of its own.
- 2An outdoor game played with bats and a ball between two teams of eleven players, popular in England and many Commonwealth countries.
She took up cricket in college and now bowls for a club in New Jersey.
The cricket season opens in April, when the grounds are still damp.
Note
The game's name has an uncertain origin; one suggestion traces it to a Flemish phrase, met de krik ketsen, "to chase a ball with a curved stick". Like other sports it takes no article (play cricket, a game of cricket), and it works freely before other nouns: a cricket bat, a cricket ground, a cricket match, the cricket season.
- 3Complete silence and a total absence of communication.
I emailed the landlord three times about the leak, and so far, crickets.
The CEO asked for questions at the end of the town hall and got crickets.
Similarsilence
Note
The joke is in the picture: a remark falls flat, and the only sound left is the insect chirping in the quiet. It is American slang and always plural, often closing a sentence on its own: I asked for volunteers and got crickets. Keep it for jokey, casual talk; in serious writing, no response says the same thing.
- 4Fair and sportsmanlike behavior, used mostly in the negative to say that something is unfair.
Leaking the rival bid to the press was hardly cricket, whatever the rules allowed.
She refused to sign a contract she thought wasn't quite cricket.
Note
Here the game stands in for fair play itself. The word lives almost entirely in the negative after be, with no article: that's not cricket, hardly cricket, not quite cricket. It objects to bad form rather than broken rules, so a move can be perfectly legal and still not cricket. The idiom is chiefly British.
- 5A version of the game of darts, played under its own set of rules.
At the bar's dartboard, they switched from 501 to cricket for the last round.
In cricket, she closed out the bullseye before her opponent could score on it.
- 6A relatively small section of roof built to divert water away from a horizontal line where the roof meets a chimney, wall, expansion joint, or other projection.
The inspector noted that the chimney lacked a cricket, so meltwater was pooling against the brick.
Contractors framed small crickets where the flat roof met the parapet wall to keep water from ponding.
- 7A signaling device that soldiers in hostile territory use to identify themselves to friendly troops when visibility is low.
Lost among the hedgerows before dawn, the paratrooper clicked his cricket and heard two clicks in reply.
The squad was issued crickets so scouts returning through the fog would not be mistaken for the enemy.
- 8An audible warning made up of a continuously repeating chime, designed to be hard for pilots to ignore.
The cricket kept sounding until the captain silenced it and ran the checklist.
Halfway through the climb, the cricket went off and the master caution light came on.
Note
Pilots borrowed the insect's name for a chime that, like a chirp, keeps repeating until someone acts on it. The nickname is cockpit slang rather than the alert's official name, so it suits talk among crew members better than a formal report.
- 9A low wooden stool for resting the feet on.
Mother kept a little cricket by her chair to rest her feet on while she knitted.
The child stood on a cricket to reach the top kitchen shelf.
Similarfootstool
Note
Regional speech keeps this word, whose origin is unknown, though similar words exist elsewhere in Germanic, such as Norwegian krakk, "stool". Tim Bobbin's A View of the Lancashire Dialect (1746) has a speaker pull up a cricket and settle in the nook beside the hob. Outside dialect writing, footstool is the word readers will expect.
Less common meaning
- 10To play the sport of cricket.
He gave up the law and made his living by cricketing.
Judge: Your family is in destitute circumstances. How do you get your living? Bannerman: By cricketing, your Worship.
1891, "A Cricketer in Low Circumstances", The Evening News (Sydney); cited in "What do we know about the first Test cricketer?"Note
The verb is rare, and its -ing form does most of the work: in an 1891 report in The Evening News of Sydney, a man named Bannerman tells a judge he earns his living "by cricketing". In ordinary use English says play cricket, and he cricketed every summer will strike most readers as unusual.
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Origins
From Middle English creket, from Old French criket, a diminutive of criquer ("to make a cracking sound; creak"), from Middle Dutch kricken ("to creak; crack"), from Proto-West Germanic *krakōn, from Proto-Germanic *krakōną, and related to Middle English creken ("to creak"); all are ultimately imitative of the sound. Compare Dutch kriek, Middle Low German krikel and German Kreckel, all meaning "cricket".
Perhaps from the Flemish dialect of Dutch, from the phrase met de krik ketsen ("to chase a ball with a curved stick").
Its origin is unknown, though a few similar words exist in Germanic languages, such as Norwegian krakk ("stool").