to break one's duck
- idiom
- UK
:
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- It took a while, but he broke his duck in the tournament.
Examples
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He finally broke his duck and scored his first goal.
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After several games, she finally broke her duck.
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He finally broke his duck in the last match!
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After many attempts, Sarah breaks her duck with a goal.
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After losing several matches, the team finally broke their duck and won their first game.
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It took a few attempts, but she broke her duck by scoring her first goal in the tournament.
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With this promotion, he has officially broke his duck in the competitive job market.
Antonyms
Surface Forms
Morphology
The phrase can be pieced together if a learner knows the cricket-specific sense of 'duck' (a score of zero) and the verb sense 'break' meaning to end or interrupt a state, so 'break one's duck' plausibly yields 'end one's zero/scoring drought'. However, the crucial meaning of 'duck' is specialized and culturally bound to cricket, and the overall usage is idiomatic rather than a straightforward compositional pattern, so it is not fully transparent to a typical B1 learner.
Etymology
The idiom break one's duck may come from cricket, where a duck, like a duck's egg, means a score of 'zero' because 0 looks like an egg. So when a player finally breaks that duck and scores, they end the zero, which is why the phrase means 'to get a first success or score'.