What Does "in Your Wheelhouse" Mean?

Have you ever wondered about the term “wheelhouse?” Our listener named Heidi did. She asked, “Have you guys noticed the term ‘wheelhouse’ being tossed around a lot lately? It seems to be the business meeting/pop culture buzzword du jour. I’m wondering if you’ve noticed the same and if so, if you have any theories on why that is.”

Heidi, this term is definitely in frequent use. I can’t tell you why it’s so popular, but I can tell you where it came from.

A wheelhouse is exactly what it sounds like: the little “house” on a ship where the captain stands, and where the ship’s wheel and other navigational equipment are located. That’s where the Skipper stood on the S.S. Minnow, and where Captain Merrill Stubing stood on the Pacific Princess — aka, the Love Boat.

A wheelhouse is the location of a ship's wheel.

Although people have been steering ships for centuries, the term “wheelhouse” appeared for the first time in the early 1800s. In 1840, a traveler on a ship that burned and sank in Long Island Sound wrote a letter of complaint to Daniel Webster, then U.S. Secretary of State. The ship’s captain “seemed confused,” the traveler wrote. “He went into the wheel house, and that was the last I saw of him. I rather think he stayed there until he suffocated.” 

In actuality, he didn’t suffocate. He escaped on a lifeboat, along with three other people. All 136 other people on board died in the cold January waters.

In the 1950s, baseball announcers started using the term 'wheelhouse.'

For some reason, in the 1950s, this term was picked up by baseball announcers and reporters. They began to refer to a batter’s “wheelhouse,” by that meaning the area of the strike zone where a batter swings with the most power. (Reporters also called this area the “crush zone” and the “kill zone,” by the way.) Those phrases seem pretty obvious, but we don’t know how the “wheelhouse” analogy got started. But if you imagine a sea captain standing in front of the ship’s wheel, you can see how the wheel forms a sort of target in front of the midsection. Maybe that image inspired reporters. 

Another theory, described in the Dickson Baseball Dictionary, is that batters “‘wheel’ at the ball, taking good, level ‘roundhouse’ swings.” Perhaps this “wheeling” suggested the association.

In the 1980s, 'wheelhouse' started being used to describe a person's areas of expertise.

Either way, in the 1980s, the meaning of this term extended once again. It...

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