See spitball in All languages combined, or Wiktionary
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"A pitch of a baseball that has been partly covered with saliva, illegal at most levels."
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"(baseball) A pitch of a baseball that has been partly covered with saliva, illegal at most levels."
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"A balled-up piece of paper, moistened with saliva (by chewing) and shot through a drinking straw."
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"To moisten the ball with saliva before pitching it."
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"(baseball) To moisten the ball with saliva before pitching it."
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"ref": "2008, David Wain, Paul Rudd, Ken Marino, Timothy Dowling, 01:09:07 from the start, in Role Models:",
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"ref": "2025 June 14, Nigel Andrews, “They don’t come any bigger”, in FT Weekend (Life & Arts section), London: The Financial Times Ltd., →ISSN, →OCLC, page 13:",
"text": "What happens, though, if you, the filmmaker, can't get the malevolence to work? That's where Jaws had its happy misfortune, its felix culpa. When the mechanical sharks failed to work[…][Steven] Spielberg and his cast had nothing to do but hole up evening after evening in a Martha's Vineyard house and spitball about the script, story and characters.",
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"To brainstorm ideas."
],
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"(figurative, originally US) To brainstorm ideas."
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"(baseball) To moisten the ball with saliva before pitching it."
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"(figurative, originally US) To brainstorm ideas."
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Download raw JSONL data for spitball meaning in English (3.9kB)
This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2026-09-16 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2026-09-02 using wiktextract (d6fca27 and 65e1673). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.
If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.