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What is "spitball"

Crossword clues for spitball

spitball
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
spitball
noun
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ Anna said they are the ones who score low grades and throw spitballs in class.
▪ I checked around for spitballs and paper wads.
▪ My memos are spitballs in the face of the faceless monolith where I work.
▪ The Operations students - the field men - are called spitballs around here.
▪ The other buildings are schoolrooms and a gymnasium for the spitballs and gut-men.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
spitball

spitball \spit"ball`\, spit ball \spit" ball`\, n.

  1. Paper chewed, and rolled into a ball, to be thrown as a missile; -- a childish prank.

  2. (Baseball) A pitched ball in throwing which the pitcher grips the ball between two, or three, fingers on one side (which is made slippery, as by saliva) and the thumb on the other side, and delivers it so that it slips off the fingers with the least possible friction; -- also called spitter. When pitched directly overhand a spit ball darts downward, when pitched with the arm extended sidewise it darts down and out. The use of such a pitch is against the rules of professional baseball. [Cant] -- Spit baller.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
spitball

1846 in the schoolboy sense, "bit of paper chewed and rounded as a missile;" 1904 in the baseball sense, from spit (n.1) + ball (n.1).

Wiktionary
spitball

n. 1 (context baseball English) A pitch of a baseball that has been partly covered with saliva, illegal at most levels. 2 A balled-up piece of paper, moistened with saliva (by chewing) and shot through a drinking straw. vb. To brainstorm ideas.

WordNet
spitball

  1. n. a projectile made by chewing a piece of paper and shaping it into a sphere

  2. an illegal pitch in which a foreign substance (spit or Vaseline) is applied to the ball by the pitcher before he throws it [syn: spitter]

Wikipedia
Spitball

A spitball is an illegal baseball pitch in which the ball has been altered by the application of saliva, petroleum jelly, or some other foreign substance.

This technique alters the wind resistance and weight on one side of the ball, causing it to move in an atypical manner. It may also cause the ball to "slip" out of the pitcher's fingers without the usual spin that accompanies a pitch. In this sense, a spitball can be thought of as a fastball with knuckleball action.

Alternative names for the spitball are spitter, mud ball, shine ball, supersinker, vaseline ball (because originally, Vaseline was used to give the ball a little more break), and emery ball, although technically, an emery ball is one where the ball has been abraded in much the same way that the original cut ball had been physically cut (an emery ball is also known as a scuff ball).

Spitball (disambiguation)

A spitball may refer to:

  • Spitball - baseball that has been altered by the application of saliva, petroleum jelly, or some other foreign substance.
  • Spitball (prank) - a wad of paper wet with saliva.
  • The season one episode Spitballs / Popcorn Pandemonium of the television show Rocko's Modern Life

Usage examples of "spitball".

Billy Camorra, twenty years old and six-feet-three, draped a lanky leg with garterless sock over his other knee, and began to fabricate a cardboard spitball, fishing around in his pockets for a rubber band.

When I was ten and he seventeen, Polar Bears and I had spitballed the congregation from the choir loft at Gethsemane church.

Dawn is like a substitute teacher (except that we don't throw spitballs behind her back when she's in charge).