Cricket Terms | List & Vocabulary Definitions

Cricket is one of the world’s most popular sports, with its most high-profile matches drawing crowds of over 100,000 spectators and huge TV audiences. If you’re from a country where cricket isn’t widely played but want to understand the game, learning a few basic cricket terms will help you join in conversations about cricket and follow match commentaries.

Here’s a list of 22 cricket terms to get you started.

Cricket terms

If you’re not familiar with the game of cricket but stumble upon a match on TV or in a park, you’ll probably be a bit confused about exactly what’s going on. Here’s a guide to what you’re seeing, with explanations of the most important pieces of cricket vocabulary that newcomers to the sport need to understand.

Batting and fielding

A cricket match is played between two teams of 11 players each. One team bats while the other fields, and then they swap roles.

When you’re watching, you’ll see two players in the middle of the field holding bats and wearing protective gear—gloves, pads on their legs, and often helmets to protect them from the hard ball. These are the batters (also called batsmen or batswomen), and they’re on the batting team.

All the other players you can see on the field belong to the fielding team.

The cricket pitch

The rectangular strip of very short grass in the middle of the field is called the pitch. At each end of the pitch, there are three wooden sticks called stumps. The batting team begins their innings (their turn to bat) by sending two batters onto the pitch, one at each end.

The player on the fielding team you can see “throwing” the ball (bowling) toward the batter at the other end is called the bowler. A bowler delivers six balls in a row—this set of six balls is called an over. After an over is complete, a new bowler delivers the next over from the opposite end of the pitch.

Runs

To win in cricket, you have to score more runs (points) than the other team. You can only score runs while your team is batting (i.e., during your innings).

The bowlers and the other players on the fielding team (the fielders) are trying to minimize the number of runs that the batters score and get the batters out. When a batter is out, they have to leave the field, and they are replaced by another teammate.

Getting out

A batter can get out in several ways, including:

• Letting the ball hit the stumps behind them when the ball is bowled at them
• Hitting the ball so one of the fielding team catches it before it touches the ground

Scoring runs

Batters can score runs in a few different ways, including:

• By hitting the ball out of the field (over the boundary): If it touches the ground before going over the boundary, it’s worth 4 runs. If it clears the boundary without touching the ground, it’s worth 6 runs.
• By hitting the ball and running to the opposite end of the pitch: If the batter can run to the other end of the pitch before the fielding team can hit the stumps they are running toward with the ball, they score 1 run. If the batter has more time because it takes the fielding team longer to gather the ball, the batter can run back and forth to score more runs.

The crease

A batter has safely completed a run once their bat or any part of their body is inside the area in front of the stumps they are running to. This area is called the crease. If you see a batter diving onto the ground with their bat stretched out in front of them, they are trying to get their bat inside the crease before the fielding team can hit the stumps with the ball.

Changing ends

If the batters take an odd number of runs (like 1 or 3), they will finish at the opposite end of the pitch, so the bowler will be bowling the next ball to a different batter.

When one over is finished, a new bowler bowls the next over from the opposite end, and the batters stay where they are.

The wicketkeeper

The player you can see on the fielding team standing behind the batter (wearing big gloves, pads, and usually a helmet) is called the wicketkeeper. The wicketkeeper’s job is to:

• Stop the ball if the batter misses the ball (so the batters don’t have the opportunity to take a run)
• Get the batter out by catching the ball after it has hit the batter’s bat but before it has touched the ground—e.g., when the batter mistimes their shot and the ball comes off the edge of their bat (they edge or nick the ball)
• Get the batter out by stumping them, which means touching the ball on the stumps or throwing the ball at the stumps when the batter has stepped outside their crease—e.g., when the batter takes a few steps forward before they try to hit the ball and miss it

Frequently asked questions about cricket terms

Is it inning or innings?

In the sport of cricket, it is innings (with an “s”) not “inning.”

In cricket, an innings is a team’s “turn” to bat instead of field.

The plural of the cricket term “innings” is also “innings” (e.g., “In test cricket, the teams get two innings”).

The word “inning” (without an “s”) is a baseball term.

QuillBot’s free AI chat can answer your questions about cricket terms.

What does sticky wicket mean?

A sticky wicket is a British English cricket idiom meaning “a tricky situation” (e.g., “We’re on a bit of a sticky wicket here because we promised two important customers we’d deliver projects next week, and we’re going to have to disappoint one of them”).

It comes from a cricket term meaning a playing surface that is difficult to play on if you are a batter because it is wet and soft.

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What does bowled over mean?

If you are bowled over by something, it means that you are very impressed with it, often unexpectedly (e.g., “I was bowled over by the quality of the performances at the talent show”).

This idiom may come from an old cricket term meaning to hit the wooden “sticks” behind the batter.

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