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pinball

nounverbattested in dialogue

  • //ˈpɪnˌbɔːl//

A game, played on a device with a sloping base (a pinball machine), in which the player operates a spring-loaded plunger to shoot a ball, between obstacles, and attempts to hit targets and score points.

noun

  1. 1

    A game, played on a device with a sloping base (a pinball machine), in which the player operates a spring-loaded plunger to shoot a ball, between obstacles, and attempts to hit targets and score points.

  2. 2

    The ball used in pinball.

  3. 3

    figurativeA situation where a ball is frantically kicked between many players.

    The opener came from a Jarvis ball which struck Aleksandar Kolarov en route to a lively round of pinball between City players before it was poked in by Milijas.

Etymology

From pin + ball.

verb

  1. 1

    To dart about rapidly.

    Like most immigrants, Gibbs came South for economic reasons and soon found himself pinballing around a world circumscribed by the hot growth markets...

    They went off the road and pinballed alongside a stretch of guardrail as the Bambis scattered.

Forms

plural
pinballs
past tense
pinballed
past participle
pinballed
present participle
pinballing
third person singular
pinballs
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).