Crossword clues for fungo
fungo
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
"A fly ball hit to a player during fielding practice in which the batter (often a coach) tosses the ball into the air and hits it as it descends with a long and narrow bat." [Paul Dickson, "The Dickson Baseball Dictionary," 3rd ed., 2009], attested from 1867 (fungoes), baseball slang, of unknown origin; see Dickson's book for a listing of the guesses. Perhaps from a Scottish fung "to pitch, toss, fling;" perhaps from some dialectal fonge "catch," a relic of Old English fon "seize" (see fang), or possibly from the German cognate fangen. Not in OED 2nd ed. (1989). There does not seem to have been a noun phrase (a) fun go in use at the time. It formally resembles the Spanish and Italian words for "fungus."
Wiktionary
n. (context baseball English) A fielding practice drill where a person hits fly balls intended to be caught.
Usage examples of "fungo".
Tommy had a long thin fungo bat and we took turns hitting fly balls to each other.
Rafferty grabbed Mad Dog's fungo bat and the wire prong and hid in the bushes behind the portajohn.
With its tail curled, the dead monitor lizard is roughly the length of a sawed-off fungo bat, and stout enough to require a firm two-handed swing.
A gray boom microphone, the size of a fungo bat, hung over his head.
With a growl he swung his refurbished left arm like a fungo bat across his body.
After they had batted a few times and chased a few fungoes, the Bayport Bears replaced them on the diamond.
Ted said this guy was so fuckin fast he could hit a fungo pop fly at home plate, then run out to shortstop and catch it himself.