field
pronunciation
How to pronounce field in British English:
UK [fiːld]
How to pronounce field in American English:
US [fiːld]
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- Noun:
- a piece of land cleared of trees and usually enclosed
- a region where a battle is being (or has been) fought
- somewhere (away from a studio or office or library or laboratory) where practical work is done or data is collected
- a branch of knowledge
- the space around a radiating body within which its electromagnetic oscillations can exert force on another similar body not in contact with it
- a particular kind of commercial enterprise
- a particular environment or walk of life
- a piece of land prepared for playing a game
- extensive tract of level open land
- (mathematics) a set of elements such that addition and multiplication are commutative and associative and multiplication is distributive over addition and there are two elements 0 and 1
- a region in which active military operations are in progress
- all of the horses in a particular horse race
- all the competitors in a particular contest or sporting event
- a geographic region (land or sea) under which something valuable is found
- (computer science) a set of one or more adjacent characters comprising a unit of information
- the area that is visible (as through an optical instrument)
- a place where planes take off and land
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- Verb:
- catch or pick up (balls) in baseball or cricket
- play as a fielder
- answer adequately or successfully
- select (a team or individual player) for a game
Word Origin
- field
- field: [OE] Like plain, field seems originally to have meant ‘area of flat, open land’. It comes ultimately from the Indo-European base *plth-, which also produced Greek platús ‘broad’, English place and plaice, and possibly also English flan and flat. A noun derived from it, *peltus, entered prehistoric West Germanic as *felthuz, which subsequently disseminated as German feld, Dutch veld (English acquired veld or veldt [19] via its Afrikaans offshoot), and English field.=> flan, flat, place, plaice, veld
- field (n.)
- Old English feld "plain, pasture, open land, cultivated land" (as opposed to woodland), also "a parcel of land marked off and used for pasture or tillage," probably related to Old English folde "earth, land," from Proto-Germanic *felthuz "flat land" (Cognates: Old Saxon and Old Frisian feld "field," Old Saxon folda "earth," Middle Dutch velt, Dutch veld Old High German felt, German Feld "field," but not found originally outside West Germanic; Swedish fält, Danish felt are borrowed from German; Finnish pelto "field" is believed to have been adapted from Proto-Germanic). This is from PIE *pel(e)-tu-, from root *pele- (2) "flat, to spread" (see plane (n.1)). The English spelling with -ie- probably is the work of Anglo-French scribes (compare brief, piece). As "battle-ground," c. 1300. Meaning "sphere or range of any related things" is from mid-14c. Physics sense is from 1845. Collective use for "all engaged in a sport" (or, in horse-racing, all but the favorite) is 1742; play the field "avoid commitment" (1936) is from notion of gamblers betting on other horses than the favorite. Cricket and baseball sense of "ground on which the game is played" is from 1875. Sense of "tract of ground where something is obtained or extracted" is from 1859. As an adjective in Old English combinations, often with a sense of "rural, rustic" (feldcirice "country-church," feldlic "rural"). Of slaves, "assigned to work in the fields" (1817, in field-hand), opposed to house. A field-trial originally was of hunting dogs.
- field (v.)
- "to go out to fight," 16c., from field (n.) in the specific sense of "battlefield" (Old English). The sports meaning "to stop and return the ball" is first recorded 1823, originally in cricket; figurative sense of this is from 1902. Related: Fielded; fielding.
Antonym
Example
- 1. We are planning initiatives in this field .
- 2. Any particles that interact with this field are given mass .
- 3. A man crouches over something in the field .
- 4. We study real things on the field trips .
- 5. But the broadbalk field shows something else .