A gunfight between armed people; in sports, a tiebreaker where players take turns trying to score.
Compound word of 'shoot' and 'out,' emerging in 19th-century American English describing gun battles. Later adopted in sports to describe sudden-death overtime formats.
The term 'shootout' got adapted from Wild West gunfights to modern sports—soccer penalty shootouts and hockey shootouts are explicitly named after gunfights, which is a strange metaphorical choice that shows how deeply Western frontier mythology embedded itself in global sports culture!
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