pitcher

Noun

pitcher (plural pitchers)

1. One who pitches anything, as hay, quoits, a ball, etc.
2. (baseball, softball) The player who delivers the ball to the batter.
   • 2003, John E. Peterson, The Kansas City Athletics: A Baseball History: 1954–1967, Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, →ISBN, page 210:

     A “pitchometer” was installed on the scoreboard to time the pitchers. According the baseball rules a pitcher had to throw a pitch within 20 seconds after he received the ball from the catcher when there was nobody on base.

3. (slang) A drug dealer.
   • 2000, Michael Massing, The Fix, page 67:

     To the residents of Spanish Harlem, these pitchers embodied the drug trade at its most sinister; they were the dealers and pushers who were destroying their neighborhood.

4. (obsolete, UK, slang) One who puts counterfeit money into circulation.

   Synonym: snide pitcher

   • 1863, Blanchard Jerrold, Signals of Distress in Refuges and Homes of Charity (etc.), page 2:

     To discover […] how the honest poor are compelled to hob-and-nob with the “shoful pitcher” and the “gun,” it is necessary to visit the vast nursery-grounds of crime.

5. (chiefly US, colloquial) The top partner in a homosexual relationship or penetrator in a sexual encounter between two men.

   Synonym: top

6. (obsolete) A sort of crowbar for digging.
7. One who makes a pitch or proposal.

   The pitcher of the new film stands to earn millions.

8. (obsolete, UK, slang) A person who sells anything in the streets.

Noun

pitcher (plural pitchers)

1. A wide-mouthed, deep vessel for holding liquids, with a spout or protruding lip and a handle; a water jug or jar with a large ear or handle.
   • 1846, Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The New Adam and Eve”, in Mosses from an Old Manse:

     At length, in a refrigerator, Eve finds a glass pitcher of water, pure, cold, and bright as ever gushed from a fountain among the hills.

2. (botany) A tubular or cuplike appendage or expansion of the leaves of certain plants. See pitcher plant.

See also

• flagon

Further reading

• Pitcher (container) on Wikipedia.Wikipedia

Noun

pitcher (plural pitchers)

1. Pronunciation spelling of picture, representing dialectal English.
   • 1934, William Byron Mowery, Challenge of the North:

     She's purtier'n uh pitcher, son, but what in th' name o' thunderin' snakes c'n you do with 'er in this here country?

   • 2015, Stephen Gresham, Rockabye Baby:

     Nineteen sixty-nine, shore as hell, Clay Lawrence —that magazine had uh pitcher of ya—was uh All-American defensive back at the University of Missouri.

Usage notes

According to Royal Spanish Academy (RAE) prescriptions, unadapted foreign words should be written in italics in a text printed in roman type, and vice versa, and in quotation marks in a manuscript text or when italics are not available. In practice, this RAE prescription is not always followed.