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Glite Dictionary
🏙️ A person from York 🏏 A cricket ball
yorker

yorker

45 8.2
A ball bowled to land near the batsman's feet that is hard to hit
  • noun
  • Jargon
translation icon : yorker
  • The bowler delivered a yorker that made the batsman miss the ball completely.

Examples

  • She skillfully bowled a yorker, causing the batsman to struggle to make a shot.

  • I'm a hardened New Yorker, but what I saw really disturbed me.

    Fiction book (1995)

  • During the match, the team was praised for their effective use of yorkers to restrict the run score.

Compounds

New Yorker
146 2.8

A person born in or living in New York City

Surface Forms

yorker singular
yorkers plural

Morphology

yorker = York (opaque) = York + er

The form is historically tied to York + -er, but the cricket term is a specialized lexicalized sense that is not recoverable for most learners from the place-name base.

Etymology

Yorker has uncertain beginnings, but one popular story links it to the city York, where bowlers were said to bowl very low, fast balls. A yorker lands at the batsman's feet and 'traps' him, which explains why the word now means a delivery that is very hard to hit.