“Words mean things,” but those things change overtime. For specialist uses, such as sporting endeavors, those changing meanings may not be well reflected in larger dictionaries like Merriam-Webster and the OED. If you work much after Gutenberg, you’re in luck: specialist dictionaries abound! Several, including this one (below), are digitized. The National Sporting Library also has quite a collection, including a few just years apart by the same author, allowing researchers to look for small changes in either the usage or the public understanding of a given word.