Fielders

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A player in baseball or softball who is positioned to catch, field, or throw the ball
2. those responsible for defensive plays in a team sports context
3. individuals who play a role in gathering or analyzing data in various fields of study

Etymology: The plural "fielders" simply adds the regular English "-s" to "fielder," the baseball term for a player who stands in the field and tries to catch or stop the ball. The singular "fielder" is older than its sport. It goes back to Middle English "feldere," meaning someone who works in the field, a rustic, and before that to Old English "feldeware," literally "field-dweller." The word is built from "field" plus the agent suffix "-er," so its earliest sense was a person defined by where they lived and labored. The baseball meaning arrived much later. Its first recorded use dates from 1832, when the defensive players scattered across the grass were still being named by their position on the field. The sport's "fielder" thus took a farming term and applied it to a player whose job is to be out in the open ground, away from the batter's box.