Duck in Cricket: Golden, Diamond, Royal & Every Type Explained

A duck in cricket is when a batter is dismissed for zero runs. The name comes from “duck’s egg”, a nod to how the number 0 looks on the scoreboard. Cricket has built a whole vocabulary around it — golden, silver, diamond, royal and more — with each name marking exactly how, or how quickly, a batter fell without scoring.

What a duck means

At its simplest, a duck is any dismissal that leaves a batter on 0 in the runs column. It does not matter whether they survived one ball or forty; if the innings ends with no runs against their name, it is a duck. The one exception is being not out for 0 — for example, running out of partners at the other end — which is recorded but not counted as a duck.

Where the term comes from

The word traces back to the mid-19th century phrase “duck’s egg”, used because a zero written on the scoreboard resembles the oval shape of an egg. Over time commentators and scorers shortened it to simply “duck”. The same logic gave American baseball its “goose egg”, but only cricket built out an entire family of named ducks around the idea.

Types of duck

Type	Definition
Duck	Out for 0 (any number of balls faced)
Golden duck	Out on the first ball faced, for 0
Silver duck	Out for 0 on the second ball faced
Bronze duck	Out for 0 on the third ball faced
Diamond duck	Out for 0 without facing a legal delivery (e.g. run out at the non-striker’s end, or out off a wide)
Royal / platinum duck	Out on the first ball of the team’s innings (an opener, first ball of the match)
Pair	Out for 0 in both innings of a match
King pair	A golden duck in both innings of a match

Golden vs diamond — the common mix-up

People confuse these two constantly, but the difference is clean:

• A golden duck means the batter actually faced a legal ball and got out to it — bowled, caught, lbw or otherwise, all on delivery one.
• A diamond duck means they never faced a legal delivery at all. Most often it is a run-out while backing up at the non-striker’s end, or a dismissal off a wide, which does not count as a ball faced.

Put simply: golden duck, ball faced; diamond duck, no ball faced.

Notable ducks and record holders

Ducks are cricket’s most-tracked misfortune, and the extremes belong to bowlers batting at the tail. Courtney Walsh of the West Indies holds the Test record with 43 ducks across his career. Across all international formats combined, Sri Lanka’s Muttiah Muralitharan leads with 59 ducks in Tests, ODIs and T20Is, as of 2026. Both were world-class bowlers whose batting was never the point — a reminder that a duck reflects a single dismissal, not a player’s overall value.

Why ducks matter

A duck is often the first visible sign of a top-order collapse, and fans have kept score of the rarer varieties for decades as running trivia. A king pair — a golden duck in both innings of the same match — is about as painful an entry as a batter can pick up. Because each duck counts as a completed innings of zero, it also drags down a batting average, which is why avoiding one, especially early, matters most to specialist batters.

Related terms

Ducks sit alongside a handful of other zero-related cricket phrases worth knowing: a pair (two ducks in one match), a king pair (two golden ducks), a not out 0 (survived without scoring, not counted as a duck), and the informal silver and bronze ducks for second- and third-ball dismissals. Understanding them turns a bare “0” on the scoreboard into a precise story of how a batter’s innings ended.