Yorker

This is a specialist term from the game of cricket. It describes a ball bowled in line with the stumps, landing at the batsman’s feet, with the objective of going under the bat and hitting the stumps. The earliest citation for a Yorker in cricket appears to be 1861. Some sources maintain that it comes from ‘coming or putting over a Yorkshire’ on someone, which means playing a trick on someone or deceiving them, but Eric Partridge in his Dictionary of Historical Slang dates this usage from c 1870. This would indicate Yorker was in use before this slang expression gained momentum. The people of Yorkshire love their cricket. So why not settle for the theory that the Yorker was simply invented there some time in the latter half of the 19th century.