Other forms: batting, batted, bats
A bat is the small furry animal that flies out at dusk and sleeps hanging upside down. It is also the shaped stick you swing at a ball — a cricket bat by the door, a baseball bat under the counter.
The two senses are unrelated words that ended up spelled the same way. There is a verb from the sports one: England batted first, he is batting well. A second verb means to flutter your eyes, and it lives almost entirely in the negative — she did not bat an eyelid, meaning she showed no reaction whatever. Off your own bat is British for on your own initiative, while right off the bat is American for immediately. And blind as a bat is the fixed comparison, though the animal manages perfectly well in the dark.
1nounbatA small flying animal with fur that comes out at night and hangs upside down to sleep.~39%
“A bat flew twice round the garden and disappeared over the hedge.”
2nounsportsA wooden stick or paddle used to hit a ball in a game.~39%
“He held the bat too low and missed the ball completely.”
3verbtakeTo take your turn hitting the ball in cricket or baseball.~20%
“Australia will bat after lunch.”
4verbopenTo open and close your eyes quickly.~2%
“She batted her lashes and pretended not to understand.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 13 sentences found in the wild and placed 10 of them on a sense (3 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
The animal's name is a dialect form of Middle English bakke, a word from the Norse-speaking north — Swedish dialect still has natt-batta for it. Old Norse also called the creature leðrblaka, a leather flapper, from blaka, to flap. What survives in English is the flap, worn down to three letters.
Old Norse
leðrblaka
Middle English
bakke,balke
English, today
bat
Built from
Dialectal variant of Middle English bakke,balke, of gmq origin (akin to dialectal Swedish natt-batta). Perhaps compare Old Norse leðrblaka literally “(leather) flapper”, from leðr + blaka (“to flap”). Compare also gmq-osw natbakka, gmq-oda nathbakkæ.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA