Meaning
To make brief contact with someone - to check in, exchange updates, confirm a plan - as Wiktionary defines the extension: to meet or make contact with someone, usually briefly. Farlex glosses it as contacting someone to update them or receive an update; McGraw-Hill as talking or conferring briefly. Business English's friendliest email opener: just touching base about the invoice. Usually with with: touch base with someone. The plural touch bases is attested but often corrected - the image is of touching one base at a time. Do not confuse with this site's step up to the plate or the general reach first base (not catalogued here), which draw on other moments of the game. Regional use: North American origin; now general business English.
Origin
From baseball, where a runner must literally touch each base - usually with a foot, sometimes with a hand - to be safe or to score; Wiktionary records both the literal sport sense and the idiomatic extension, labels the idiom colloquial and chiefly Canadian and American, and notes the alternative form touch bases. The word base itself reached the game early: Etymonline records baseball from the mid-19th century with base-runner (1867) and base-hit (1874) among its early compounds, on a base word used for the children's game (prisoner's base) since the mid-1400s. No public dictionary consulted prints a first-use date for the idiomatic touch base; the phrase's enormous currency in business English is a late-twentieth-century growth, and fussy stylists still prefer the singular - touch base, not touch bases, because the runner touches one base at a time.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- touch bases
- touched base
- touching base
Usage Examples
- Just touching base about the venue - is Thursday still good for the launch?
- Let's touch base after the board meeting and compare notes.
- She touched base with every department head before signing off the reorganization.