Word.ws English Dictionary

play ball

play ball verb: to start anything tumultuous.

Verb

play ball (third-person singular simple present plays ball, present participle playing ball, simple past and past participle played ball)

  1. (idiomatic) To start anything tumultuous.
  2. (idiomatic) To work together; to cooperate.
    • The politicians refused to play ball with the journalists.
    • Donohue also promised Kopacz he'd help him out of his numerous legal problems in several stales if K. would play ball with Mass. cops and agree to implicate Roger Spear and Mark Davis as malefactors in Barbre's death.1981 April 11, Philip Shehadi, “Dutch Gays Come To NY, Protest Immigration Laws”, in Gay Community News, page 4
  3. An expression used at the beginning of a game of baseball or softball.

play ball meaning in Malayalam and Kannada

play ball in Malayalam

collaborate, cooperate, play the game
സഹായസന്നദ്ധത കാട്ടുക, സഹകരിക്കുക, പങ്കുവഹിക്കുക, സഹായിക്കുക, യോജിച്ചു പ്രവർത്തിക്കുക, ഒത്താശ ചെയ്ക

play ball in Kannada

ಸೆಂಡಾಡು, ಚಂಡಾಡು, ಚೆಂಡಾಡು

Forms of play ball

third-person singular presentplays ball
present participleplaying ball
past participleplayed ball
pastplayed ball

Words formed from play ball

Questions about play ball

What does play ball mean?
Play ball means to start anything tumultuous.
What is play ball in Malayalam?
Play ball in Malayalam is സഹായസന്നദ്ധത കാട്ടുക, സഹകരിക്കുക, പങ്കുവഹിക്കുക. See Play ball meaning in Malayalam.
What part of speech is play ball?
Play ball is a verb.
What is the past tense of play ball?
The past tense of play ball is played ball.

Words near play ball in the dictionary

  1. play along
  2. play around
  3. play at
  4. play away
  5. play back
  6. play ball
  7. play big
  8. play booty
  9. play both ends against the middle
  10. play both sides against the middle
  11. play bow

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: play ball (page history and authors); play ball (Olam, E.K. Kurup corpus) (dataset and license); play ball (Kannada Wiktionary) (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:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-au-play ball.ogg.

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