minor league
49
3.0
- noun
- /ˈmaɪnər liɡ/
- US
:
liga menor
- My son played in the minor leagues for the Cubs and he's also been a high school and a college pitching coach.
- minor league baseball
- minor league team
- minor league players
I thought we were just in the minor leagues trying to get the bigs.
- I thought we were just in the minor leagues trying to get the bigs.
- So I asked him what's the difference between hitting the best minor league pitch and an average Major League pitch?
- I almost bought the minor League Baseball team with Tony Hsieh, who unfortunately passed.
- So the the thing I want to make clear is I played minor League Baseball for eight years, OK?
- The Russians traded them for a minor league shortstop and potato.
Examples
-
To convince my students they are surrounded by social psychology, we attended a minor league hockey game.
Academic text (2005) -
Many of these students had never seen a minor league hockey game before.
Academic text (2005) -
My mom used to take me to some minor league games.
-
I used to play minor league ball myself once, about 100 years ago.
-
So the the thing I want to make clear is I played minor League Baseball for eight years, OK?
-
Hundreds of others played minor league ball, and thousands more are in training for a life in baseball.
Academic text (1994) -
Survey data were collected at a minor league team's home games on two consecutive nights.
Academic text (2003) -
Indeed, added entertainment was the least important factor in minor league fans' decision to attend baseball games.
Academic text (2003) -
Corny is a mascot for the Normal Corn Belters, a minor League Baseball team based in Normal, IL.
-
Many of these students had never seen a minor league hockey game before.
Synonyms
1
3.5
A level in a sports league below the top one where teams are weaker
1
4.8
Professional sports leagues below the major leagues, often in baseball
1
8.9
A low-level baseball league often used to describe something of lower quality
Antonyms
How Professional
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning 'a lower-level or less prominent sports league' is directly and transparently built from 'minor' (smaller/lesser in status) + 'league' (a sports organization). This simple adjective + noun composition is cross-linguistically common and follows predictable English patterns, so a B1 learner who knows both words will readily infer the MWE meaning.
Etymology
Minor league comes from sports where teams are put into different levels. The word minor means smaller or lower and league is a group of teams, so the minor league is the lower-level group where players learn and try to move up to the 'major' teams.