AT BAT Definition & Meaning

at bat

[ at bat ]

Phonetic (Standard)IPA

adverb

Baseball.

taking one's turn to bat in a game:
And now Sanchez is at bat with two runners in scoring position.

noun

Baseball.

a player’s turn to bat, officially recorded as such unless the batter walks, is hit by a pitch, makes a sacrifice hit, or is interfered with by the catcher:
In her debut appearance with the Rockford Peaches, she posted two hits in three at-bats.

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�y��vlog History and Origins

Origin of at bat¹

First recorded in 1880–85

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Idioms and Phrases

Taking one's turn. For example, At this conference, with so many interruptions, it's hard to tell which speaker is at bat , or I was nervous while waiting to testify, but once at bat I felt better . This idiom, from baseball, was already being transferred to other enterprises by the 1880s. Also see on deck .

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Example Sentences

Examples have not been reviewed.

The facts show that Trump is quite aware of how to deal with American voters in his second time at bat from the Oval Office and he obviously doesn’t care what his detractors think.

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“Those early kind of signals can be helpful for understanding the progression of the fungus, of where it’s getting to,” said Winifred Frick, chief scientist at Bat Conservation International and an adjunct professor in ecology and evolutionary biology at UC Santa Cruz.

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Can he still generate the power needed to be productive at bat?

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“I felt good after my first at bat, so I knew I could do it.”

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Dr. Tina Cheng, the director of white-nose syndrome research at Bat Conservation International, was not involved in the study and has studied the deadly disease up-close, albeit not as a microbiologist.

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Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023

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