Word.ws English Dictionary

play-by-play

play-by-play adjective: describing a sports commentary in which a commentator describes every action in some detail as it occurs, often assisted by a second commentator who provides background information and other comments.

Adjective

play-by-play (not comparable)

  1. (US) Describing a sports commentary in which a commentator describes every action in some detail as it occurs, often assisted by a second commentator who provides background information and other comments.
    Synonyms:
    ball-by-ball
  2. (figuratively) Providing a detailed stepwise description (of how certain events unfolded).
    • A stripper who works at the New York gentlemen’s club where the Cardi B brawl reportedly popped off gave a play-by-play account of the fracas in a recent radio interview.2018 September 6, Terry Shropshire, “Stripper tells what happened in Cardi B fight with Offset’s alleged mistress”, in Rolling Out

Noun

play-by-play (plural play-by-plays)

  1. (US) A detailed description or analysis of sporting events as they occur in succession, one play at a time.
    • So I collected a cross section of play-by-plays, definitely not as many as I'd like to collect but enough to feel pretty comfortable with what I was seeing.2004, Dean Oliver, Basketball on Paper: Rules and Tools for Performance Analysis

Synonyms of play-by-play

Forms of play-by-play

pluralplay-by-plays

Origin of play-by-play

From play + by + play.

Questions about play-by-play

What does play-by-play mean?
Play-by-play means describing a sports commentary in which a commentator describes every action in some detail as it occurs, often assisted by a second commentator who provides background information and other comments.
What part of speech is play-by-play?
Play-by-play can be an adjective or a noun.

Words near play-by-play in the dictionary

  1. play-book
  2. play-books
  3. play-by-email
  4. play-by-mail
  5. play-by-mails
  6. play-by-play
  7. play-by-plays
  8. play-by-snail-mail
  9. play-calling
  10. play-doh
  11. play-house

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: play-by-play (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.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “play-by-play.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/play-by-play. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.