yips
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 2.15 in modern English
9
Scrabble Score
4
Letters
1
Syllables
4
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
A nervous condition which prevents a sportsperson from playing properly; especially a condition which causes a golfer to miss an easy putt, or a tennis player to serve a double fault.
Informal; Uncountable
Example Sentences
- "His office is a baseball park and he is a pitcher for the N.Y. Mets—a job guaranteed to give anyone a good case of after-hours yips."
- "Bracing as all this may be to the President, it gives his security and logistical forces the yips."
- "Golfers may be surprised to learn that the yips, in one form or another, occur in a wide variety of other sports and even in other non-athletic walks of life and work."
- "Defining precisely why a professional cyclist might lose his touch on descents is as difficult as explaining a golfer's yips or a striker's sudden inability to find the net. It happens rarely, most famously in the early 1990s; the double world champion Gianni Bugno suffered from it and only rediscovered his "flow" after being made to listen to Mozart to calm his nerves."