Meaning
In baseball, for a batter to be retired after three strikes, as Wiktionary defines the sport sense; by extension, to fail at something, to come away with nothing - McGraw-Hill's gloss runs from the batter 'declared out after making three strikes' to the plain figurative 'to fail'. Applied to romantic approaches, striking out means being rejected. The dictionaries disagree on the noun's first record - 1887 versus 1911 - reported rather than reconciled. Three strikes and you're out is the companion formula this implies. Keep distinct from this site's step up to the plate, which borrows the same game. Regional use: American baseball origin; now general English.
Origin
The baseball rule gives the phrase: three strikes and the batter is out, recorded as a noun by both the OED (strike-out, earliest evidence 1911, in the writing of J. B. Foster) and Merriam-Webster (strikeout, first known use 1887 - the two dictionaries disagree by more than two decades, while Merriam-Webster separately dates the general verb strike out, in its older senses, to 1707). The figurative failure sense grew with baseball's grip on American English: McGraw-Hill prints both the baseball and the failure senses side by side, and the romantic use - he struck out with her - is a modern extension of the same failure idea. A strikeout pitcher and strikeout records keep the literal sense alive in the sport itself.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- striking out
- struck out
Usage Examples
- We struck out at every bank in town before the credit union finally said yes.
- The batter struck out with the bases loaded, and the season ended there.
- He struck out with the insurance claim, the appeal and the ombudsman in turn.