A Cricket Glossary for Newcomers

Overs, ducks, maidens, googlies and the Duckworth-Lewis method — the words a commentator will not stop to explain, in plain English.

Torch Editorial · 7 min read · Updated September 2026

Cricket has one of the richest vocabularies in sport, and almost none of it is self-explanatory. This is the working set — enough to follow a broadcast without reaching for a search engine every thirty seconds. If you have not yet read [how the three formats differ](/guides/cricket-formats-explained), start there; the words below make more sense once you know whether you are watching three hours or five days.

The frame of the game

• Innings — a team’s turn to bat. Note the “s”: it is spelled that way in both singular and plural. A T20 side has one innings; a Test side has two.
• Over — a set of six legal deliveries bowled from one end. After each over, play switches to the other end and a different bowler takes over.
• Maiden — an over from which no runs are scored. A small triumph for the bowler.
• Wicket — confusingly, three things at once: the three wooden stumps, the strip of ground between them (the pitch), and a batter’s dismissal. “He took three wickets” means he got three batters out.
• Crease — the painted lines marking a batter’s safe ground and the bowler’s legal delivery point.
• Declaration — in Tests only, a captain voluntarily ending his own team’s innings, usually to leave enough time to bowl the opposition out.
• Stumps — the end of a day’s play in a multi-day match. A scoreboard reading “Stumps, Day 2” means play has closed for the evening, not that anything went wrong.

Scoring words

• Run — the unit of scoring, earned by the two batters running between the creases, or awarded for a boundary.
• Four — a shot that reaches the boundary rope along the ground: four runs.
• Six — a shot that clears the boundary on the full: six runs. Cricket’s home run.
• Extras — runs conceded by the fielding side rather than earned by the bat: wides (a ball too far from the batter to hit), no-balls (an illegal delivery, usually overstepping), byes and leg byes.
• Century — an individual score of 100 runs or more, the benchmark achievement for a batter. A half-century is 50.
• Duck — being dismissed for zero. A golden duck is being out on the very first ball you face.
• Run rate — runs scored per over. The required run rate is what the chasing team now needs per over, and it is the single most useful number on the screen in a limited-overs match.

Reading the score

A cricket score is written as runs for wickets lost — “168/3” means 168 runs with three batters out. Some countries invert it (“3/168”), meaning the same thing. A chasing team’s line often adds a target: “126/4 (16 ov, T:164)” means 126 runs, 4 out, after 16 overs, needing 164 to win.

Ways of getting out

• Bowled — the ball hits the stumps. The cleanest dismissal there is.
• Caught — a fielder catches the ball on the full after the batter hits it. The most common dismissal by a distance.
• LBW (leg before wicket) — the ball strikes the batter’s body when it would otherwise have gone on to hit the stumps. The most argued-about rule in the sport.
• Run out — the fielding side breaks the stumps while the batters are still running between the creases.
• Stumped — the wicketkeeper breaks the stumps while the batter has stepped out of the crease and missed the ball.
• Hit wicket — the batter knocks over his own stumps. Rare, and mortifying.

Bowling words

• Pace and spin — the two families of bowler. Pace bowlers rely on speed and movement through the air; spinners rely on the ball turning sharply off the pitch.
• Yorker — a delivery aimed at the batter’s feet, very hard to hit, and the standard weapon at the death of a T20 innings.
• Bouncer — a short delivery that rears up at the batter’s head or chest.
• Googly — a spinner’s disguised delivery that turns the opposite way to the one the batter is expecting. The best trick in cricket.
• Hat-trick — three wickets in three consecutive deliveries by the same bowler. The term originated in cricket and was borrowed by every other sport.
• All-rounder — a player good enough at both batting and bowling to be picked for either.

Fielding and the field

• Wicketkeeper — the one fielder in gloves, crouched behind the stumps. Cricket’s catcher.
• Slips — the fielders standing in a row beside the wicketkeeper, waiting for an edge off the bat.
• Powerplay — a phase with fielding restrictions limiting how many fielders may be spread to the boundary, which pushes the batting side to attack. In T20 it covers the first six overs.
• The death — the closing overs of a limited-overs innings, when batters swing hardest and bowlers try to survive. “Death bowling” is a specialist skill.

When the weather intervenes

Cricket is stopped by rain more than any other major sport, and it has an unusually mathematical answer. The Duckworth-Lewis-Stern method (DLS) recalculates a fair target when overs are lost, weighting the wickets a team has left as well as the overs. If a match ends early you will see a note that a team won “by 12 runs (DLS method)” — that is what happened. In a Test there is no such adjustment; lost time simply makes a draw more likely.