offside rule

Noun

offside rule

1. (various team sports) The rule determining whether a player is in an offside position; that is, an illegal position ahead of the ball, puck, etc.
   1. (various team sports) The prohibition of teammates closer to the opponents' goal than the person kicking or throwing the ball unless there are two (originally three) opponents at least as close to their goal line.
      • For the time the Etonians had their way, and it was not until 1867 that the Association adopted its present off-side rule, which provides that no man can be ' off-side ' unless there are less than three players of the opposite side in front of him when the ball is passed.1889, Badminton Library of Sports and Pastimes - Volume 20, page 277
      • To the unintelligent or careless, the great stumbling-block is Law 6, known as the off-side rule. It is of itself a reflection on the bulk of young players that this particular provision is so little understood, or rather so misunderstood. The rule provides that when a player kicks the ball, or...1897, Hoffmann, Every Boy's Book of Sport and Pastime, page 429
2. A system that gives right-of-way at an intersection to traffic approaching from the side on which one is not driving.
   • An off-side rule would work splendidly at even the most complex junctions.1955, The Motor - Volume 107, page 555
   • According to the off-side rule, a priority vehicle relative to the driver's own vehicle is one which approaches on the nearest carriageway of the crossing road.1969, Australian Road Research - Volume 4, page 15
3. In some programming languages, the convention by which the indentation of a line of source code affects its meaning.
   • Blocks in Pythons are delimited by white space indentation: the increase in indentation delimited the start of statements while the decrease signifies the end of the current block (off-side rule).2018, Encyclopedia of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, Elsevier, →ISBN, page 195