Word.ws English Dictionary

pickleball

pickleball noun: a racquet sport resembling tennis, played with solid paddles and a perforated ball, which combines elements of badminton, table tennis and wiffleball.

pickleball: a racquet sport resembling tennis, played with solid paddles and a perforated ball, which combines...
Image: E is for Ian, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

pickleball (countable and uncountable, plural pickleballs)

  1. (uncountable) A racquet sport resembling tennis, played with solid paddles and a perforated ball, which combines elements of badminton, table tennis and wiffleball.
    • For the rapidly decreasing number of Americans who've never heard of pickleball, the obscure paddleball game is America's fastest growing sport for the second year in a row.2022 February 19, Shannon Mullen, “America's fastest growing sport is a cross between tennis, ping pong, and badminton”, in National, NPR, retrieved 19 Feb 2022
    • It’s hard to say whether Corona was actually playing pickleball or was just nowhere near Slowjamastan at the time of the burglary and thinks it’s funny to say he was playing pickleball.2025 February 1, Noah Goldberg, “He runs a desert micro-nation by the Salton Sea. Population Zero.”, in Los Angeles Times, archived from the original on 01 Feb 2025
  2. (countable) The ball used in the sport of pickleball.

pickleball meaning in Vietnamese

pickleball in Vietnamese

sport
pickleball

Forms of pickleball

pluralpickleballs
alternative formpickle ball
alternative formpickle-ball

Origin of pickleball

From pickle boat and ball. Coined by the sport inventor's wife who was reminded "of the pickle boat in rowing where oarsmen were chosen from the leftovers of other boats." Similarly, the game initially used left-over equipment from badminton, table tennis, and wiffleball.

Words formed from pickleball

Questions about pickleball

What does pickleball mean?
Pickleball means a racquet sport resembling tennis, played with solid paddles and a perforated ball, which combines elements of badminton, table tennis and wiffleball.
What is pickleball in Vietnamese?
Pickleball in Vietnamese is pickleball. See Pickleball meaning in Vietnamese.
What part of speech is pickleball?
Pickleball is a noun.
What is the plural of pickleball?
The plural of pickleball is pickleballs.

Words near pickleball in the dictionary

  1. pickle-herring
  2. pickle-herrings
  3. pickleable
  4. pickleback
  5. picklebacks
  6. pickleball
  7. pickleballer
  8. pickleballers
  9. pickleballs
  10. pickleboat
  11. pickled

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: pickleball (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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Cite this entry: “pickleball.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/pickleball. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.