Meaning
A rough number - an estimate good enough to work with, offered without any pretence of precision. The phrase invites negotiation: a ballpark figure is where the conversation starts, not where it ends, and everyone at the table knows the digits will move. Pairs naturally with 'in the ballpark' (close enough) and 'out of the ballpark' (not even close). Regional use: General English (American origin).
Origin
A baseball stadium of a word, finished by the atomic age. A ballpark has meant an enclosed baseball field since 1893, but the figurative leap belongs to weapons scientists: Etymonline records 'in the (right) ballpark', meaning within an acceptable range of approximation, from 1954, when it was jargon among atomic-weapons scientists - possibly the area within which a test missile was expected to return to earth. Ralph Lapp's 'Atomic Candor' article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that October shows the quotation marks still on: 'Assuming this estimate is in the ball park, clearly there is valid reason for urging candor on the part of our government.' The adjectival sense of approximate, and with it the compound ballpark figure, followed by 1967, which agrees with Ammer's late-1960s dating of the completed idiom as an extension of in the ballpark and out of the ballpark. Dictionaries now define it as simply an approximate number, the Manhattan Project having long fallen out of the explanation.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- ballpark estimate
- in the ballpark
- out of the ballpark
Usage Examples
- The surveyor's ballpark figure was forty thousand; the invoices came to forty-one thousand two hundred - close enough to approve the contingency.
- We are in the ballpark on price and miles apart on indemnities.
- Give the board a ballpark figure, not a spreadsheet: they will argue about the order of magnitude before the digits.