🎱 A billiards game ⛳ A golf team game

fourball

1 7.5

A golf match where teams of two each play and the best score per hole counts

noun
/ˈfɔrbɔl/

Jargon

: fourball

During the charity event, we played fourball and had a lot of fun helping each other on the course.

Examples

Bubba Watson asked the crowd to keep chanting and cheering when he stepped to the tee for his afternoon fourballs with Webb Simpson, and the Masters champion belted his drive down the middle, raising his driver to play to the crowd.

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The fourball tournament attracted numerous teams, all eager to compete for the championship title.
Nicolas Colsaerts, the 29-year-old from Belgium, helped Europe avoid getting shut out in afternoon fourballs by single-handedly taking down Woods and Steve Stricker.

Blog text (7)
Josh Sens on the Tuesday fourball match at Cypress Point between Bubba Watson/Rickie Fowler and Davis Love/Fred Couples.

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In a fourball match, each player plays their own ball, and the team with the lowest score on each hole wins.

Synonyms

golf

vsfourball

858 1.0

A game on a large outdoor course where players hit a small ball into holes using few strokes

is a specific two-player team contest using each player's best hole score

golf game

vsfourball

20 1.2

A sport on a large outdoor course where players use clubs to hit a small ball into holes

is a team match where pairs play two balls and take the lower score

Surface Forms

fourball singular

fourballs plural

Morphology

fourball = four + ball (semi-transparent) = four + ball

The components signal 'four' + 'ball', but the specific golf-match rule (two-player teams, best score counts) is a specialized sense not fully inferable from the parts by a general learner.

Etymology

Fourball comes from the parts four and ball, meaning 'four balls', because in golf the match has two teams of two players so there are four balls in play and the team's score is the best of the two on each hole.