English, especially the English spoken in the United States, is full of colloquial words and phrases whose original source is various sports and games. Such usage is particularly frequent in casual conversation, journalism, politics, and business. For example, a recent survey of 5000+ idiomatic and metaphoric terms and phrases used on the pages of the respected US newspaper Washington Post by reporters and columnists in their discussion of the 2016 US Presidential campaign contained more than 500 different idioms and extended metaphors originating in sports and games. No other realm of life originated more than 200 entries in this data set. We have found that these idioms are difficult to understand for many non-native speakers, including translators and interpreters. In particular, they have few analogues in Russian. This dictionary provides explanation and examples of the general meaning of these idioms in English and Russian.

Usually dictionaries of idiomatic usages are limited to one category, such as slang, idioms, clichés, catchwords, quotations, and allusions. We have considered it most useful to include all of these, as long as their source is sports and games. In the body of the text, idioms are grouped together according to the sport or game in which they originated. The sports covered are as inclusive as possible, including traditional sports, indoor games, gambling, and even children's games. Organizing the entries by theme makes it easy for even a casual reader to become intrigued with the origin and nature of sports idioms. On the other hand, the extensive and user-friendly key word and phrase (idiom) indexes at the end of the book offer the working translator and interpreter a fast reference resource. We have numbered idioms continuously from the beginning to end of the dictionary to simplify use of the index to find a particular word or phrase.

After the English-Russian dictionary, there is a brief 112-entry Russian-English dictionary of all the sports idioms we were able to identify in Russian.

At the end of the book, after indexes of the English idioms, the reader will find an index of Russian idioms; however, that list is too short to require an index of key words. Our search for additional Russian sports idioms was intense and as exhaustive as we could make it. The 112 listed here were all we could find. An analysis of why in the English language there are so many more idioms in common use that derive from sports is intriguing and we believe sociological in nature. However, our conjecture about this matter has no impact on the nature or use of this dictionary and we decided not to include it here. We hope readers will write to us with comments and additional idioms, especially in Russian, and perhaps with suggestions for translating this dictionary into other languages.
About the Author: Vladimir Kovner is an engineer, a journalist and an English-Russian translator and editor, specializing in poetry, bard songs, ballet and idioms, and having numerous publications in anthologies and journals in Russian and English. His memoirs The Golden Age of "Magnitizdat" about the bard movement era in Soviet history have been published in the USA and Russia. Vladimir has published two books of his poetic translation from English into Russian: Pet the Lion - children's poetry, 2010, and Edward Lear. The Complete Limericks with Drawings, a bilingual English-Russian book, 2015. Magic Dreams. Confessions of Drug Addicts by Sergey Baimukhametov, translated from Russian by Vladimir Kovner and Daniel Veksler was published in 2016.

When Winston Churchill was asked the secret of his long life and good health, he answered: "Sports. I never played them". Slightly re-phrasing Churchill, 80-year-old Vladimir answered the same question: "Sports. What haven't I played!" (Soccer, volleyball, sambo - the art of self-defense, judo, tennis, ice-skating, cross-country, downhill and water skiing).

Lydia Razran Stone is a native English speaker whose family came to the US during the first Russian emigration. She holds an MA in the Russian language and literature and a Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology, both of which have been invaluable in her work as a translator. Lydia began translating professionally in 1977 and passed the ATA certification examination for Russian to English in 1983. Between 1985 and 1995, Lydia worked for NASA putting out a digest of Russian research reports on space biology and medicine and performing and managing translation for a bilingual book on this subject under the auspices of NASA and the Russian Academy of Sciences. Since 1985 she has edited SlavFile, the only publication intended for Slavic translators in the United States. She (often with Vladimir) has given one or more presentations at virtually every ATA Conference. She has published five bilingual books of poetry including her renderings of the immortal fables by Ivan Krylov and The Llittle Humpbacked Horse by Peter Yershov (often attributed to Alexander Pushkin). A number of her articles have been published in the Russian translation journal Bridges, one of them with Vladimir on Limericks by Edward Lear, and a recent one in the International Journal of Lexicography.