To be three for three is to have a perfect score: three attempts, three successes. A forecaster who has called three elections correctly is three for three, and so is a cook whose last three dinner parties all came off. The pattern stretches to fit whatever is being counted, so people also go two for two, four for four, or oh for five when nothing has worked at all. It is an American import, informal and usually spoken, and the verb that goes with it is nearly always “go”: you went three for three on your predictions.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘three for three’?
The phrase is baseball arithmetic. American box scores sum up a batter’s day as hits set against official times at bat, so “one for four” is a poor afternoon and “three for three” is perfection, a hit every time the player came to the plate. A batter who goes three for three has a batting average of 1.000 for the day, which is why the expression keeps company with its sibling idiom “batting a thousand”.
Early twentieth-century sports pages spelled the sum out in full. In July 1912 the Augusta Daily Herald in Georgia saluted Ty Cobb, whom it claimed as a local, under the headline “Cobb gets three hits in three times at bat”, teasing that Cobb “wasn’t feeling very well before the game” and had managed only three hits. Later the same month the Atlanta Georgian’s batting notes reported of another American League star:
Collins had a perfect record, three hits in three times at bat.
The idea the phrase now carries, a perfect record, was already attached to the count; only the wording still needed shortening.
The compressed form was routine in American sports pages by the mid 1940s. The Athens Banner-Herald of 20 June 1946 reported that one Charlie Owens “put on a hitting exhibition by getting three for three at bat, one triple and two singles”. The verb form that dominates today followed close behind, and by the 1950s players “went three for three” in match reports across the country. The Atlanta Daily World of 12 June 1958 gives a typical example:
“Big Jim” Swinney went three for three with two doubles and a triple.
Google’s Ngram corpus of scanned books tells the same story: “went three for three” barely registers before the late 1940s, then climbs steadily through the second half of the twentieth century and is still rising. As it spread, the counting loosened. Sportswriters began applying it to whole contests rather than at-bats, as when the Jackson Herald of Jefferson, Georgia noted in January 2009 that a high-school team “went three for three last week, defeating Banks County, East Jackson and Union County”. From there it was a short step out of sport altogether, to salesmen three for three on pitches, pundits three for three on predictions, and anyone else with a run of successes worth counting. What survives the journey is the box score’s blunt logic: successes measured against attempts, with no room for argument about the result. British English reached the same idea through a different sport: three on the trot make a hat-trick.