Meaning & use
inning
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Meanings
nouncountable
In baseball, one of the nine periods of a game when each team bats and fields.
Grammar: Countable: you can say 'an inning', 'two innings', or 'the seventh inning'. It is often used with ordinal numbers.
Patterns
- the first inning
- score in an inning
- a nine-inning game
The Yankees scored three runs in the first inning.
He pitched a perfect inning, retiring all three batters.
The game went into extra innings after a tie.
nouncountableBritish
In cricket, a team's or player's turn at batting, or a period of play.
Grammar: In cricket, the plural 'innings' is often used for a single turn, especially in British English. You can say 'an innings' or 'a good innings'.
Patterns
- bat an innings
- a long innings
- declare an innings
He played a brilliant innings of 120 runs.
England's first innings ended with a score of 300.
The team declared their innings to give themselves more time to bowl.
Word forms
| plural | innings |
|---|
Common combinations
- the bottom of the inning
- They scored the winning run in the bottom of the ninth inning.
- extra innings
- The game went to extra innings and lasted past midnight.
- a scoreless inning
- The pitcher threw a scoreless inning, striking out two.
- a good innings
- In cricket, a batsman who scores fifty runs has had a good innings.
Synonyms and how they differ
Word family
- innings noun
- In cricket, the plural form used for a single team's turn at batting.
Commonly confused: inning or inning?
inning vs inning
Not to be confused with 'inning' as a suffix meaning 'the act of putting in', as in 'a good inning' (rare). The sports meaning is the common one.
Practice
In baseball, how many innings are there in a standard game?
Choose one answer.
A standard baseball game has nine innings. Seven and five are used in some other sports or shortened games, but not in standard professional baseball.
Make it your own
Write a sentence using “inning”, then check it and compare it with the examples above.