inning
inning
Old English
“An innings was a reclaiming of land from the sea — Old English innung meant bringing in, drawing back in, and it first described the drainage of marshes before it described a team's turn at bat.”
Old English innung derived from innian (to take in, to house) and ultimately from in (inside). Innung described the act of bringing in or recovering — specifically, the reclamation of land from water, the draining of marshes and fens to make farmland. An inning of land was land that had been recovered from flooding or the sea. The word described acquisition and recovery: taking something back in.
Cricket adopted the term innings in the 17th century for each team's opportunity to bat. The parallel with agricultural inning was not coincidental: a cricket innings was a side's opportunity to gather runs, to bring in their score, to harvest what they could from their time at the crease. The agricultural metaphor of bringing in the harvest mapped onto the sporting structure of accumulating runs.
British English preserved the plural innings even for a single turn at bat — a team has an innings, not an inning. American English simplified this to inning for baseball's half-inning, but kept innings for cricket in British usage. The American simplification caused no end of pedantic correspondence.
To have had a good innings — a long, productive life or career — is a British idiom that maintains the cricket metaphor. A person who dies in old age after a full life has had a good innings. The agricultural root and the cricketing structure converge in a phrase that describes human life as a scored period of play, valuable for its length and quality.
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Today
A good innings is one of those British idioms that works because it is so specifically not about cricket. When someone says of an elderly person who has died that they had a good innings, they are drawing on a full chain of meaning: a cricket innings has a beginning and an end, produces a score, is remembered for its quality rather than just its length, and eventually concludes when the last wicket falls.
The agricultural root makes the metaphor richer: an innings was originally about bringing something in, gathering the harvest. A good life is one that gathers — experience, relationships, accomplishment. The Old English farmer draining the fens and the modern cricketer batting through a long afternoon are joined by the same root word.
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