hockey
Pluralhockeys (some meanings)
- 1An ice sport for two teams of six players, who skate and compete to score goals by using sticks to shoot a puck into their opponents' net.
The hockey final drew thousands of fans to the arena.
She has played hockey since she was five years old.
Note
In Canada and the US the unmarked word means the ice game, the reverse of the Commonwealth default. When context is thin, the puck gives it away: a puck means ice, and a ball means turf. For a mixed international audience, writing ice hockey in full removes any doubt about which sport is meant.
- 2A team sport played on a grass or turf field in which players use curved sticks to hit a ball into a goal net.
She has played hockey on grass since she was a child.
Defenders cleared the ball from their own half during the hockey match.
Note
Across the Commonwealth, plain hockey means the game on grass or turf, played with a ball. Speakers there add ice only when they mean the other sport, while North Americans reverse the default and say field hockey. The usual constructions are play hockey and beat a team at hockey.
- 3Any of a family of related sports in which players use sticks to drive a ball or puck into a goal.
Hockey, in its various codes, is played across more than a hundred countries.
Whether on ice, grass, or a hard court, hockey relies on sticks and a target goal.
Note
The umbrella sense covers every stick-and-goal game at once. The word dates from the sixteenth century, and its origin is unknown. One guess ties it to hook, for the curve of the stick; another traces it to French hoquet. In everyday speech the bare word rarely stays this general: listeners hear the field game or the ice game, depending on where they live.
- 4Solid waste discharged from the body; excrement.
The path through the pasture was dotted with cow hockey.
He tracked hockey into the kitchen on his boots.
Similardung, manure, poop, excrement, muck
Note
American slang that sounds milder than what it means. Despite the spelling, it is a separate word from the sport. It turns up most in farmyard compounds such as horse hockey and cow hockey, and in the phrase making hockey, as in Donald Harington's Lightning Bug (1970). Horse hockey also works as a jokey insult. Keep it for casual talk.
- 5Alternative form of hawkey. Regional and dated.
Note
Here hockey is a spelling of hawkey, an old British name for the supper that closed the harvest; that name is now obsolete. The spellings crossed in both directions, since hawkey was also once a way of writing the sport. Context sorts them out: a hockey held in a barn after the wheat is in is a meal, not a match.
Less common meaning
- 6Alternative form of oche. Dated.
Note
A darts player's word, now dated, for the line the front foot must stay behind. Harry Harrison's Skyfall (1977) puts a thrower's "toes against the hockey." Unlike the sport, this sense is countable: Keith Turner's Darts (1985) writes of short hockeys in small bars, because the distance varied from pub to pub. The current spelling is oche.
Practice
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Origin
Recorded from the 16th century, but its origin is unknown. It may be related to "hook," from the curved shape of the stick, or it may come from French "hoquet."