foul line

Questions about foul line

What does foul line mean?

foul line means "a line from which basketball players take penalty shots". That is the primary sense; the word has 3 in total, listed in full on this page.

Is foul line a common word?

foul line is banded "Familiar" — widely understood, used when the subject calls for it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.