pitcher
Pluralpitchers
- 1The defensive player who throws the ball toward home plate for the batter to hit.
The pitcher delivered a curveball that fooled the batter completely.
Relief pitchers often enter the game in the final innings.
Similarhurler
Note
In baseball and softball, the player and the throw share a root: a pitcher delivers a pitch. The clock on that delivery is not new. John E. Peterson's The Kansas City Athletics (2003) describes a "pitchometer" on the scoreboard and a rule giving pitchers twenty seconds to throw once they got the ball back from the catcher with nobody on base.
- 2A deep, wide-mouthed vessel for holding liquids, fitted with a handle and a spout or lip for pouring.
A ceramic pitcher of iced tea sat in the middle of the table.
The waiter refilled our pitcher with water twice during dinner.
Note
A different word altogether from the pitchers who throw. It comes through Middle English picher from Old French pichier, "small jug," and it is a doublet of beaker, since both descend from the same Late Latin source. It usually names its contents with of, as when Nathaniel Hawthorne's Eve finds "a glass pitcher of water" in 1846, with the material placed in front.
- 3
- 4A person who throws or tosses something, in any sense of pitching an object toward a spot.
A good pitcher of horseshoes knows just how much spin to add.
The carnival pitcher lobbed rings toward the rows of bottles.
Similarthrower
Note
A plain agent noun, pitch plus -er, so it follows wherever the verb goes. A tent pitcher sets a tent up, a quoits pitcher throws rings at a peg, and a pitcher of ideas puts them forward. The object tells you which kind of pitching is meant. It is a separate word from the jug for pouring, which shares only the spelling.
- 5The active, penetrating partner in sex between two men; the top.
He told his partner he had always preferred being the pitcher.
The two men joked over drinks about which of them was the pitcher.
Similartop
Note
A sexual borrowing from the baseball player: the pitcher delivers, and by the same joke the receiving partner is the catcher. It is colloquial and mainly American. People use it jokingly or among those at ease with frank talk, and top is the plainer synonym.
- 6A person who sells illegal drugs, especially directly to users on the street.
A local pitcher controlled drug sales on that block for years.
The pitcher slipped the package into a buyer's coat pocket.
Note
Street slang from the drug trade, where the pitcher is the one who hands over the goods. Michael Massing's The Fix (2000) places these pitchers in Spanish Harlem alongside "the dealers and pushers," as the most visible face of the trade. Because the baseball sense is so familiar, the word needs clear context to read this way. In neutral writing, dealer is the safer choice.
- 7A tubular or cup-shaped appendage formed by the leaves of certain plants, such as the pitcher plant.
The pitcher of the plant secretes a fluid that drowns visiting insects.
Some species grow pitchers large enough to trap small frogs.
Note
Botany borrowed the shape of the pouring jug: the leaf grows into a hollow tube or cup that holds fluid. The word gives the pitcher plant its name. In carnivorous plants such as Nepenthes and Sarracenia, the pitcher is where insects fall in, drown and are digested. In technical writing the word names the organ, not the whole plant.
- 8Pronunciation spelling of picture, showing a casual or regional way of saying it.
"That's an old pitcher of my mama," he said, pointing at the mantel.
In the novel, the farmer drawls, "Let me show you a pitcher of my new truck."
Note
A third word wearing the same letters: picture, spelled the way some dialect speakers say it. It appears in written dialogue among other respellings, such as "purtier'n uh pitcher" in William Byron Mowery (1934) and "uh pitcher of ya" in Stephen Gresham (2015). It keeps picture's meanings of likeness and photograph. Use it only to render speech, because anywhere else it reads as the jug.
Less common meanings
- 9A person who sells goods in the streets, a street seller hawking wares to passersby.
Each morning the pitcher set out his wares on the busy thoroughfare.
A pitcher hawked roasted chestnuts to the evening crowd.
Note
Another obsolete piece of British street slang, but an innocent one: this pitcher sold wares to passersby, often from a regular spot by the road. Unlike the passer of bad coin, nothing here is criminal. A modern writer would say street trader, and this sense of pitcher belongs to historical settings.
- 10A person who puts counterfeit money into circulation by spending it among ordinary people.
A clever pitcher could spend a dozen forged shillings in a single afternoon.
The magistrate sentenced the pitcher to transportation for passing bad coin.
Note
A piece of British criminal slang, long obsolete: the pitcher's job was to spend bad money, getting it into honest hands. The word usually carried a qualifier, as in snide pitcher or the "shoful pitcher" of Blanchard Jerrold's Signals of Distress (1863), named alongside the "gun" among the criminals the poor were forced to mix with. Today it belongs only in historical writing about the underworld.
- 11A heavy iron bar of the crowbar type, used for breaking up and digging into hard ground.
The laborers loosened the packed earth with a heavy pitcher before shoveling.
He leaned his weight on the pitcher to pry the buried stone free.
Note
An obsolete tool name from the same pitch-plus-er family as the general "one who pitches". It names an iron bar driven into hard ground to break it up. Modern readers will meet it only in older texts. Today the tool is called a crowbar or a digging bar.
Practice
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Origins
Formed from the verb "pitch" combined with the suffix "-er."
From Middle English "picher," from Old French "pichier" or "pechier" ("small jug"), from Late or Medieval Latin "pīcārium," an alteration of "bīcārium," which may come from "bacarium" or possibly from Ancient Greek "bîkos." It is a doublet of "beaker."