wicket

From Anglo-Norman, Old Northern French wiket, from Old Norse (specifically, Old East Norse) víkjas, diminutive of vik. Compare modern French guichet, ultimately from the same Old Norse source.

• IPA^(key): /ˈwɪkɪt/

• Audio (AU)

  (file)

• Rhymes: -ɪkɪt

wicket (plural wickets)

1. A small door or gate, especially one beside a larger one.
   • 1834, L[etitia] E[lizabeth] L[andon], Francesca Carrara. […], volume III, London: Richard Bentley, […], (successor to Henry Colburn), OCLC 630079698, page 25:

     ...and one, a cool, bold fellow, whom I know well, will unlock the town gate, and—for he has various talents—hopes, through his influence with a pretty daughter of one of the wardens, to leave unbarred a certain wicket in the postern on the seaward side.

   • 1906 August​, Alfred Noyes, “The Highwayman”, in Poems, New York, N.Y.: The Macmillan Company; London: Macmillan & Co., published October 1906, OCLC 28569419, part 1, stanza IV, pages 46–47:

     And dark in the dark old inn-yard a stable-wicket creaked / Where Tim the ostler listened; his face was white and peaked; / His eyes were hollows of madness, his hair like mouldy hay, […]

2. A small window or other opening, sometimes fitted with a grating.
   • 1978, Lawrence Durrell, Livia, Faber & Faber 1992 (Avignon Quintet), p. 386:

     As he did so he heard the shuffle of footsteps entering the chapel and the clicking of the confessional wicket.

3. (Britain) A service window, as in a bank or train station, where a customer conducts transactions with a teller
   • 1953, Samuel Beckett, Watt, Olympia Press:

     Watt climbed the stone steps and stood before the wicket, looking through its bars. He admired the permanent way, stretching away on either hand, in the moonlight, and the starlight, as far as the eye could reach, as far as Watt's eye could have reached, if it had been inside the station.

4. a ticket barrier at a rail station, box office at a cinema, etc.
5. (cricket) One of the two wooden structures at each end of the pitch, consisting of three vertical stumps and two bails; the target for the bowler, defended by the batsman.
6. (cricket) A dismissal; the act of a batsman getting out.
7. (cricket) The period during which two batsmen bat together.
8. (cricket) The pitch.
9. (cricket) The area around the stumps where the batsmen stand.
10. (croquet) Any of the small arches through which the balls are driven.
11. (skiing, snowboarding) A temporary metal attachment that one attaches one's lift-ticket to.
12. (US, dialect) A shelter made from tree boughs, used by lumbermen.
    • 1873, Andrew Leith Adams, Field and Forest Rambles:

      make kindly welcome whatever forest wanderer happens to enter the wicket of the log hit

13. (mining) The space between the pillars, in post-and-stall working[1].
14. (Internet, informal) An angle bracket when used in HTML.
15. (veterinary) A device to measure the height of animals, usually dogs.

• on a good wicket
• sticky wicket
• wicket gate