the.com/pitch
A word so versatile it sells startups, blackens roads, and tunes your screaming.
means A word covering several distinct things — a persuasive sales talk, a sticky black tar from distilling resin or coal, the highness or lowness of a sound, the act of throwing, and the steepness of a slope or roof.
from Two unrelated roots collided into one spelling. The black-tar 'pitch' descends from Old English 'pic', borrowed from Latin 'pix' (the sticky stuff), a cousin of words across Europe for resin and tar. The throwing/leaning 'pitch' is a separate Middle English verb 'picchen', meaning to thrust, fix, or set in place — from which we get pitching a tent, a ship pitching on waves, the pitch of a roof, and the modern sense of pitching a deal. The musical sense of 'pitch' grew out of that same throwing-and-setting idea, the level at which a note is 'set'.
- tar speed
- Pitch flows so slowly it took 13 years per drop
- perfect pitch
- Roughly 1 in 10,000 people identify notes instantly
- baseball origin
- The throwing pitch and sales pitch share one root
- darker than dark
- Pitch-black named the absence of light itself
- musical math
- Doubling frequency raises pitch exactly one octave
world baseball classic — international baseball tournament where teams compete on a literal pitch, held every 4 years since 2006
cricket pitch at lord's — the playing surface at lord's cricket ground in london, 22 yards long, used since 1814