#5: Baseball

Definition:

: a game played with a bat and ball between two teams on a large field having four bases that mark the course a runner must take to score

About the Word:

Introduced by Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey, written in 1798 or 1799 but published in 1817:

It was not very wonderful that Catherine, who had by nature nothing heroic about her, should prefer cricket, base ball, riding on horseback, and running about the country, at the age of fourteen, to books.

Although Austen appears to be the first to use the term in a literary context, a recent discovery by historian David Block shows an even earlier allusion to the game in a 1749 newspaper.

Photo credit: Wikimedia.