Other forms: scored, scoring, scores
The score is where the numbers stand. Two–one at half time, sixty-eight out of a hundred on the spelling test, the little figures ticking up in the corner of a video game.
It is a verb as well, and in sport it is the commonest one there is: you score a goal, score a point, score twice in the second half. Away from the pitch a score is written music — the pages on the conductor's stand, and the music written for a film, which a composer scores. Older uses hang on inside phrases. A score is twenty, kept alive in three score years and ten, and you can score a line into wood or card with a blade, which is where the whole word began. Three more to keep apart: know the score is to understand how things really stand, settle a score is to pay somebody back for an old wrong, and scores of people means a great many.
1nounscoreThe number of points each side or each person has.
“The final score was two–one.”
2verbwinTo win a point, a goal, or a mark in a test.
“He scored twice in the second half.”
3nounfilmThe written music for a film, a play, or an orchestra.
“The score was recorded in a church hall over two days.”
4nounsetA set of twenty.
“Three score and ten was once thought a full life.”
5verblineTo cut a line into a surface, as a guide for folding or cutting.
“Score the card with a blunt knife so that it folds cleanly.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
A score was first a notch — Old English scoru, a cut made in a stick, from a root that meant simply cut, the same one standing behind shear. You counted by cutting. Drovers cut one mark for every twenty beasts through the tollgate, which is why a score is also twenty, and why the score in a game is still something you keep.
Middle English
score
English, today
score
Built from
From Middle English score. From Middle English score, skore, schore, from Old English scoru (“notch; tally; score”), from Old Norse skor, from Proto-Germanic skurō (“incision; tear; rift”), which is related to skeraną (“to cut”), ultimately from Proto-Indo-European (s)ker- (“cut”). Cognate with Icelandic skora, Swedish skåra, Danish skår. Related to shear. For the sense “twenty”: The mark on a tally made by drovers for every twenty beasts passing through a tollgate.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA