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Glite Dictionary
to bowl out

to bowl out

1 8.1
To get all the players who are batting for the other team out so they cannot bat anymore
  • phrasal verb
  • Jargon
translation icon : eliminar
  • During the match, the fast bowler helped to bowl out the entire batting lineup in just 30 overs.

Examples

  • The cricket team managed to bowl out their opponents for just 120 runs.

  • In game two, the Hawks were set 132 to chase, but were bowled out by New Jersey short of the total, highlighted by a hat trick from CLNJ bowler Jasdeep Singh.

    Blog text (7)

  • If you couldn't bowl them out, the saying went, you knocked them out.

    Fiction book (1994)

  • Over to your pads, 'cause you're gonna get bowled out there, right?

    The Mother (2003)

  • They were confident they could bowl out the other team before lunchtime.

Surface Forms

bowl out infinitive
bowling out present participle
bowls out third person singular
bowled out past
bowled out past participle

Morphology

bowl + out

The components 'bowl' (to deliver a ball) and 'out' (removed from play) combine in an intuitively compositional way to mean causing players to be out by bowling. However, the precise cricket-specific sense of dismissing the entire opposing side (or the transitive use 'bowl someone out') and the pragmatic nuance require sport-specific knowledge, so it is not fully predictable for a general B1 learner.

Etymology

Bowl out comes from cricket. Here bowl means to throw the ball and out means a batsman is dismissed. When the bowlers get every batsman out and the team is 'all out', they have bowl out the opposition, so the phrase means 'to dismiss all the batsmen'.