Word.ws English Dictionary

game, set, match

game, set, match phrase: victory at the conclusion of a tennis match.

Phrase

game, set, match

  1. Victory at the conclusion of a tennis match.
    • "Game, set and match to Byrd!" announced Westcott above the applause. "Byrd wins the School Championship!"1915, Ralph Henry Barbour, chapter 13, in Left Tackle Thayer
  2. (broadly, idiomatic) An expression indicating finality, announcing that a series of events—usually involving some form of rivalry—has reached a conclusion.
    • A few years after that, Mikhail Gorbachev effectively surrendered in a cold war that had lasted almost four decades, and in a few more years the Berlin Wall came down. Game, set, match.2003 February 19, Christopher Buckley, “Opinion: Another March of Folly?”, in New York Times, retrieved 09 Jun 2015
    • The atom bomb: U.S. 1, U.S.S.R. 0. Then came Sputnik, and the score was tied at 1 apiece. Then Apollo and putting a man on the moon — game, set, match.2010 July 6, Mark Thompson, “Hyping Hypersonic Missiles”, in Time, retrieved 09 Jun 2015

Forms of game, set, match

alternative formgame, set and match

Origin of game, set, match

Each noun names a component of the next one, and the final point scored by the victor is one that not only wins the game but also (thereby) wins the set and also (thereby) wins the match. The concept is comparable to the notion that the winning point not only makes their day but also makes their week and makes their month.

Questions about game, set, match

What does game, set, match mean?
Game, set, match means victory at the conclusion of a tennis match.
What part of speech is game, set, match?
Game, set, match is a phrase.

Words near game, set, match in the dictionary

  1. game wardens
  2. game with a purpose
  3. game's gone
  4. game, set and match
  5. game, set, and match
  6. game, set, match
  7. game-changer
  8. game-changers
  9. game-changing
  10. game-end
  11. game-ended

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: game, set, match (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-au-game, set, match.ogg.

Cite this entry: “game, set, match.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/game%2C_set%2C_match. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.