Other forms: balls
A ball is the round object almost every game is played with. Kick the ball, throw the ball, a tennis ball.
It also means anything round: a ball of wool, a ball of dough. A ball is separately a formal dance — a masked ball, the ball is at nine — which is where football gets none of its name and ballroom gets all of it. The idioms are everywhere: on the ball, have a ball, drop the ball, the ball is in your court, and play ball, meaning to cooperate.
1nounballA round object used in games.~79%
“The ball went over the fence for about the ninth time.”
2noundanceA formal dance.~21%
“The ball starts at nine and finishes at about three.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 14 sentences found in the wild and placed 14 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
ball is a round object, or a dance.
Old English beall comes from a Germanic root meaning to swell — the same root as balloon, bowl and, at a distance, bulge. The dance is a separate word from French bal, meaning to dance.
Middle English
bal
English, today
ball
Built from
From Middle English bal. From Middle English bal, ball, balle, from an unattested Old English beall, bealla (“round object, ball”), from Proto-Germanic balluz, ballô (“ball”), from Proto-Indo-European bʰélō (“ball, bubble”), from Proto-Indo-European bʰel- (“to blow, inflate, swell”). Cognate with Old Saxon ball, Dutch bal, Old High German bal, ballo (German Ball (“ball”); Ballen (“bale”)). Related forms in Romance are borrowings from Germanic. See also balloon, bale.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA