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Glite Dictionary
to batting a thousand

to batting a thousand

4 8.5
To have complete success in many tries
  • idiom
  • Informal
translation icon : tener éxito rotundo
  • I'm batting a thousand lately for wines; I just want to sit back and enjoy sniffing.
  • batting a thousand so far

Examples

Synonyms

to hit a home run
vsto batting a thousand
  • Informal
17 3.4

To have a big success people do not expect

focuses on perfect success across many attempts rather than one big win
to crush it
vsto batting a thousand
  • Informal
15 7.9

Do very well in a competition or challenge

means flawless success repeatedly across a series of attempts
to hit one out of the ballpark
vsto batting a thousand
  • Informal
1 7.4

Do much better than expected

means flawless repeated success rather than just one exceptional result

Antonyms

failure
557 1.3

Not reaching what was planned or expected

to flop
19 4.0

To end without success, often in public like a show

Surface Forms

batting a thousand infinitive

Morphology

batting + a + thousand

This expression is a culture-specific baseball metaphor: 'batting' refers to hitting in baseball and 'a thousand' alludes to a perfect 1.000 batting average. The idiomatic link to 'perfect success' is not derivable from the literal meanings of the words, so a B1 learner who knows the constituents would likely not infer the meaning without knowledge of the baseball convention.

Etymology

Batting a thousand comes from baseball, where a player's success at hitting is shown as a number called the batting average. If that number is 1.000, said as 'a thousand', it means the batter got a hit every time, so the picture of someone hitting perfectly is used to mean 'perfect success'.