Preseason is the stretch of time just before a sport’s real season starts. Teams train, try out new players, and play practice matches. You will see it as a noun (“in the preseason”) and, very often, in front of another noun like an adjective: preseason training, a preseason match. In American football and basketball, preseason games look official on television, though actually they usually do not count in the same way as the regular season. In football (soccer), people talk about pre-season friendlies. Baseball fans in Taiwan know the same idea as 季前訓練 and 熱身賽. The hyphen wobbles: preseason and pre-season are both used; British sports pages like the hyphen more. A verb “to preseason” exists on paper, but you almost never need it. Season here is the sports year, not salt and pepper, and not the four seasons of weather — though of course a sports season often sits inside one of those.