Sports Dictionaries for Radio Readers

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Pat Green. I’m calling from San Diego.

And my question is, do you all have any resources or recommendations for dictionaries or something like that, encyclopedias even, for sports?

Sports.

I am one of the volunteer readers for KPBS’s radio reading service.

Good for you.

We read the paper to blind and visually impaired listeners.

And the section of the paper I have the most difficulty with is the sports section because I am just not an avid sports page reader, so I thought I’d call and ask.

And, Pat, I’m curious about the challenge that you face. You’re trying to read a story about a game that’s occurred, and you’re having trouble knowing what to accent or emphasize or what?

Yeah, sort of.

We have a group of volunteers who read both papers, the L.A. Times and the San Diego Union-Tribune, daily, and each paper has about a two-hour time slot on the program to be read.

And we do our best to read all the major sections of the paper.

There are two of us who read each time, and I find the sports section for me just hard to make it sound like I know what I’m talking about.

Oh, interesting.

Are there sports that pose a particular challenge like baseball? Or is it cricket? Are you reading the bridge column?

Well, what does?

Of course, sports are seasonal, so that’s one problem right there because you don’t have year-round access.

You know, and I know, like the World Series and the major sporting events, and especially when they happen here in San Diego, but many of the columnists also include statistics about the athletes who are in the particular sport.

You know, sometimes there’s even a little gossip about some of the athletes.

But anyway, it’s the statistics and just terminology.

You know, I know what a home run is. I know what a touchdown is, those kinds of things.

Well, certainly for baseball, you want Paul Dixon’s Baseball Dictionary.

That’s right.

Dixon’s Baseball Dictionary, and it’s huge and wonderful.

And it’s loaded with just everyday slang terms, but also rare slang terms.

And it touches on what’s known as sabermetrics, which is this complicated way of looking at all the different statistics in baseball to truly measure a player’s performance.

S-A-B-R.

I think it’s E-M-E-T-R-I-C-S.

Sabermetrics.

But overall, for other sports, there’s two books that I would recommend that might help you get there.

One of them is The Dictionary of Sports and Games Terminology. It’s by Adrian Room. It’s published in 2010.

You can find that on Amazon and probably in some bookstores.

So that’s the Dictionary of Sports and Games Terminology.

And the other one is Dictionary of Sports Studies by Oxford University Press, also 2010.

That one’s more about the science and big picture of games or sporting games.

So it’s less about the mundane details and mundane items.

It might be things like this is how cricket is played or this is what curling is.

Or this is what Gaelic football is, that sort of thing.

Yeah. Oh, great.

Which could also help.

But the other thing is, don’t discount your general unabridged dictionary.

Like Merriam-Webster’s unabridged is going to have a huge number of sporting terms in it.

Okay, but you need to have each particular.

And often when I’m reading, I’ll come across a term that I don’t know the meaning of.

Because we don’t have terribly much time to skim the articles ahead before we go on live on the radio.

There’s a site called One Look, O-N-E-L-L-O-K, onelook.com, and it lets you search a bunch of dictionaries, including the Merriam-Webster Collegiate, the American Heritage Dictionary, a few others, and pretty much almost anything I’ve ever looked for that was even remotely mainstream, like even barely mainstream, was in there.

Like the truly rare stuff is not going to be in there, but you’re not going to find much of that, I’m pretty sure.

And the good thing is that you can use that really quickly.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That’s what I’m looking for, something quick and easy to access.

Well, Pat, thank you on behalf of all the people that you are helping by volunteering to be a reader for the reading service.

Well, it’s an honor for me to do that.

I do that in memory of an aunt who had macular degeneration but didn’t let it stop her one bit and managed to live until she was 96 alone.

Good for her and for you.

Thank you so much, Pat.

You’re very welcome.

Take care.

You too.

Bye-bye.

Bye, Pat.

By the way, if you’re a giant radio nerd like I am, then you probably already know what I’m about to tell you.

But if you don’t, this is news.

You can listen to a ton of these radio reading services on apps like TuneIn, which consolidates all these online signals, including reading services from Australia.

So it’s pretty cool to hear people reading Australian newspapers in the Australian accent.

Oh, that is cool.

I don’t know a thing about cricket, but it’s really delightful.

Need a dictionary for that.

877-929-9673.