Roster

The Major League Baseball regular season starts next week, and no doubt most players would like to be on the starting roster. They would be less eager, perhaps, to be on the original “roster”, which was a gridiron for roasting meat. The Dutch word rooster was pronounced like – and was indeed the same thing as – our “roaster”. Because a gridiron-shaped roasting rack looks like a list drawn up in tabular form, the word gradually came to have its current meaning.