ball boy
4
2.8
- noun
- /bɔl bɔɪ/
:
recogepelotas
- The 252 ball boys and girls at this year's Open have some of the most physically demanding jobs in tennis.
- ball boys and girls
- former ball boy
- served as a ball boy
It's like, it's like a high stress moment as a ball boy.
- It's like, it's like a high stress moment as a ball boy.
- You move in with your dad and it's during the Bears heyday and you and your brother Rob are ball boys.
Examples
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During the tennis match, the ball boy quickly retrieved the balls that had landed outside the court.
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We have students and adults volunteering to be ball boys for soccer games.
Blog text (24) -
Ryan McIntosh works as a ball boy at the United States Open tennis tournament in New York.
Blog text (18) -
He was a ball boy at the tennis court, and when Thuy and I played, he would run before us, pick up the balls, and return them to us.
Fiction book (1992) -
Sanchez, as a young lad, also served as a ball boy for the Los Angeles Rams when they trained at the University of Redlands (1949 through '61).
Blog text (17) -
The ball boy handed the player a fresh ball before each serve in the championship game.
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As a ball boy, he learned the importance of being attentive during the fast-paced tennis matches.
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning 'a boy who retrieves balls' is directly and transparently derived from combining 'ball' (the play object) and 'boy' (a male child/young person) using a common noun+noun compounding pattern. This productive, cross-linguistically common construction (especially in sports contexts like tennis) makes the role immediately inferable for a B1 learner who knows both constituents.
Etymology
Ball boy comes from the simple idea of a ball and a boy: a young person who stands by the court to pick up and hand players the ball. That's why ball boy means 'a young helper who fetches balls for players'.