Sports and games
The origins of sporting terms and game names, from ancient races to modern toys.
- Aboveboard
Keep your hands on top of the table and nobody can accuse you of dealing from the bottom of the deck. "Above board" started as literal card-table etiquette, and the Elizabethan pamphleteer Thomas Nashe made it a metaphor in 1594, writing that Satan "plays…
From the Wed, Sep 23, 2026 roundup → - Aerobics
Dr. Kenneth Cooper, a physician in the U.S. Air Force, coined "aerobics" in his 1968 book of the same name, describing a system of exercise built around sustained oxygen use rather than brute strength. The word, and the fitness movement it named, escaped the…
From the Mon, Sep 14, 2026 roundup → - Arcade
The word "arcade" comes from the Latin arcus, meaning "bow" or "arch," by way of Italian and French terms for an arched bridge. It first described covered, arch-lined passageways — often lined with shops, a precursor to the modern shopping mall — long before…
From the Thu, Sep 3, 2026 roundup → - Arena
Every modern sports arena is named after dirt. Latin harena meant simply "sand," describing the sand-covered floor of Roman amphitheaters like the Colosseum, chosen for very practical reasons: it gave gladiators and animals solid footing and soaked up the…
From the Wed, Aug 12, 2026 roundup → - Atari
Before it was a video game company, "atari" was — and still is — a term from the board game Go, called out when a stone or group of stones is one move from being captured, roughly the Go equivalent of "check" in chess. Nolan Bushnell, an avid Go player…
From the Wed, Aug 5, 2026 roundup → - Basketball
In December 1891, Canadian-American physical education instructor James Naismith needed an indoor game to keep restless students occupied during a harsh Massachusetts winter at the YMCA International Training School in Springfield. He nailed two empty peach…
From the Tue, Aug 25, 2026 roundup → - Checkmate
"Checkmate" comes from the Persian "shah mat," and nearly every chess book will tell you it means "the king is dead." Etymologists mostly disagree. In Persian, "mat" means helpless, defeated, or at a loss, so the phrase is closer to "the king is stuck." The…
From the Wed, Sep 16, 2026 roundup → - Circus
"Circus" comes straight from the Latin word for a circular or oval arena, most famously the Circus Maximus, Rome's enormous chariot-racing stadium. The traveling shows of acrobats, animals, and clowns we associate with the word today didn't arrive until the…
From the Sun, Aug 23, 2026 roundup → - Crossword
On December 21, 1913, journalist Arthur Wynne filled space in the New York World's Christmas "Fun" section with a diamond-shaped word grid he called "Word-Cross." A few weeks later, a typesetter swapped the words to "Cross Word," and a second slip dropped the…
From the Tue, Sep 1, 2026 roundup → - Dead ringer
In 19th-century American horse racing, a "ringer" was a good horse entered fraudulently under a slower horse's name so insiders could clean up at the betting window, the word borrowed from an older bell-ringing phrase for substituting one thing for another…
From the Tue, Sep 22, 2026 roundup → - Eight ball
In the pool game named for it, sinking the black ball before you've cleared your own loses you the game, so a position where the ball you need sits behind it is hopeless. "Behind the eight ball" first appears in print on February 8, 1923, in the Buffalo…
From the Sun, Sep 27, 2026 roundup → - Exchequer
Under the Norman kings, England's revenue was reckoned on a table covered with a cloth ruled into squares, like a chessboard, with counters moved between the squares to add up what each sheriff owed. The Anglo-French word for such a board was "escheker," a…
From the Tue, Sep 29, 2026 roundup → - Frisbee
Yale students in the late 1800s used to toss around empty pie tins from the nearby Frisbie Baking Company, yelling "Frisbie!" as a warning to anyone in the way. Fred Morrison spent decades independently developing a plastic flying disc of his own, and when he…
From the Mon, Sep 7, 2026 roundup → - Gymnasium
The Greek word "gymnos" means naked, and a "gymnasium" was, literally, a place for exercising naked, which is how Greek athletes trained and competed. The buildings doubled as places for lectures and philosophy, which is why in German-speaking countries a…
From the Sat, Sep 26, 2026 roundup → - Handicap
"Handicap" began as a 17th-century betting game: two bettors would put forfeit money into a shared cap while a neutral umpire set the odds for an uneven trade, a full hand meaning you accepted the bet. The name shortened over time and eventually got borrowed…
From the Sun, Sep 6, 2026 roundup → - Hazard
"Hazard" traces back to an Arabic word for a die — az-zahr — by way of a medieval European dice game reportedly picked up during the Crusades. The game itself was notorious for wrecking fortunes on a single unlucky roll, which is presumably how the word ended…
From the Fri, Aug 28, 2026 roundup → - Kayak
English adopted "kayak" essentially unchanged from an Inuit word, qajaq, meaning roughly "man's boat" or "hunter's boat." Traditional versions were built by stretching sealskin or other animal hides over a wood or whalebone frame — a design so effective for…
From the Tue, Aug 25, 2026 roundup → - Lacrosse
French colonists in 17th-century North America watched Indigenous communities play a fast, physical game using a long stick with a small net on one end, and the curved shape reminded them of a bishop's ceremonial staff — a crosier. They called the game "la…
From the Wed, Aug 19, 2026 roundup → - Lakers
The Los Angeles Lakers franchise didn't start in Los Angeles, or even under its current nickname: it began in 1946 as the Detroit Gems, a team that lasted exactly one forgettable season before relocating to Minneapolis and picking up a new name tied to the…
From the Tue, Aug 25, 2026 roundup → - Lego
Danish carpenter Ole Kirk Christiansen coined "Lego" in 1934 by mashing together leg godt, Danish for "play well." He almost certainly didn't know at the time that "lego" also happens to mean "I put together" or "I assemble" in Latin — a coincidence so…
From the Sun, Aug 23, 2026 roundup → - Lincoln Logs
Lincoln Logs were invented around 1916–1917 by John Lloyd Wright, the second son of architect Frank Lloyd Wright — and the inspiration came from the family business. While helping his father oversee construction of Tokyo's Imperial Hotel, John studied the…
From the Fri, Aug 7, 2026 roundup → - Marathon
The town of Marathon, site of the 490 BC battle where the Athenians beat the Persians, probably takes its name from the Greek word for fennel, which grew wild on the plain. The race named for it is a much newer invention, and its famously awkward distance is…
From the Tue, Sep 15, 2026 roundup → - Mastermind
In 1970, Mordecai Meirowitz, an Israeli postmaster and telecommunications expert with no background in the toy industry, took a much older pencil-and-paper guessing game called Bulls and Cows and reworked it into a physical code-breaking game with colored…
From the Sun, Sep 13, 2026 roundup → - Nintendo
Fusajiro Yamauchi founded "Nintendo" in Kyoto in 1889 to make hanafuda, the hand-painted Japanese flower playing cards. The name is usually translated as "leave luck to heaven," though exactly what the founder intended by it is not documented. The company…
From the Tue, Sep 15, 2026 roundup → - Nuggets
Denver's NBA team started as the Denver Larks in 1967, immediately became the Rockets after an ownership change tied to a local trucking company, then rebranded again in 1974 — this time as the Nuggets, honoring Colorado's 1859 Gold Rush and, not…
From the Thu, Aug 13, 2026 roundup → - Olympics
The ancient "Olympics" started far smaller than the modern multi-sport spectacle: for the first thirteen stagings, 776 BC through 728 BC, the entire program was a single footrace the length of the stadium track, the stadion, about 192 meters. Nothing else was…
From the Sun, Sep 6, 2026 roundup → - Ouija
The talking board trademarked as "Ouija" in 1890 supposedly named itself: according to company lore, its makers held a séance and asked the board directly what it wanted to be called, and it spelled out O-U-I-J-A. A popular (and much repeated) explanation…
From the Fri, Aug 28, 2026 roundup → - Ping-Pong
The English games firm J. Jaques & Son trademarked "Ping-Pong" in 1901, naming their boxed parlor set for the sound of a celluloid ball on a vellum bat, and later sold the American rights to Parker Brothers. Because the name belonged to a company, everyone…
From the Mon, Sep 21, 2026 roundup → - Puzzle
Even the word "puzzle" is something of a puzzle. First recorded in English in the 1590s, its origin is officially listed as unknown by the Oxford English Dictionary, despite decades of guesses — one leading theory ties it to an old, obscure verb meaning "to…
From the Thu, Sep 3, 2026 roundup → - Rain check
On June 21, 1883, the St. Louis Brown Stockings announced that fans who paid for a game called off by rain before five innings would get a ticket good for a future game. The "rain check" spread through baseball within a few seasons, and by 1887 a shoe-shiner…
From the Mon, Sep 21, 2026 roundup → - Rigmarole
In 1291, and again in 1296, Edward I of England made the nobles of Scotland sign parchments swearing allegiance to him. The documents, with dozens of seals dangling from ribbons, came to be called the "Ragman Rolls," after a medieval parlor game called…
From the Fri, Sep 25, 2026 roundup → - Rodeo
Spanish "rodeo" is a rounding up, from "rodear," to go around, and on the ranches of Mexico and California it meant the seasonal gathering of cattle for branding and counting. The contest grew out of the work: cowboys competed at the skills the roundup…
From the Wed, Sep 30, 2026 roundup → - Roller coaster
The roller coaster's real ancestor is an 18th-century Russian invention: ice slides built in the gardens around St. Petersburg, reinforced with wood and sand, that Catherine the Great herself enjoyed. French entrepreneurs imported the idea, but their milder…
From the Thu, Sep 3, 2026 roundup → - Rotisserie
In December 1979, magazine editor Daniel Okrent wrote down a scoring system for a fantasy baseball league. His group held its first draft the following April, meeting regularly at a Manhattan restaurant called La Rotisserie Française, and named the format…
From the Fri, Sep 4, 2026 roundup → - Roulette
"Roulette" is simply French for "little wheel" — a straightforward name for what is, underneath all the casino theatrics, a spinning wheel with numbered pockets. The game reached its modern form in 18th-century France, though wheel-based gambling devices in…
From the Thu, Aug 27, 2026 roundup → - Rubik's Cube
Ernő Rubik was a Hungarian architecture professor, not a toymaker, when he built his first working model in 1974. He wasn't trying to invent a puzzle at all: he was trying to solve a structural engineering problem, how to let many small independent pieces…
From the Fri, Sep 4, 2026 roundup → - Scrabble
The tile game most people know as Scrabble has had two other names in its lifetime. Architect Alfred Mosher Butts first built it as a refinement of an earlier game of his own, Lexiko, then reworked it into a crossword-style version he called Criss-Crosswords…
From the Sun, Sep 13, 2026 roundup → - Scuba
Ask most people what "scuba" actually stands for and you'll likely get a blank look, even from people who dive every weekend. It's been a real, everyday word for so long that its acronym origins, self-contained underwater breathing apparatus, have mostly worn…
From the Sat, Sep 12, 2026 roundup → - Slinky
Naval engineer Richard James was trying to design springs that could keep sensitive shipboard instruments steady at sea in 1943 when he accidentally knocked a sample off a shelf — and watched, startled, as it calmly "walked" down instead of just falling. His…
From the Thu, Sep 3, 2026 roundup → - Steeplechase
In 1752, two Irish huntsmen, Edmund Blake and Cornelius O'Callaghan, settled a wager by racing cross-country between two church steeples in County Cork, jumping hedges, walls, and ditches along the way rather than following any road. Nobody recorded who won…
From the Sun, Sep 6, 2026 roundup → - Tennessee Titans
When the Houston Oilers relocated to Nashville in 1997, owner Bud Adams wanted a new name that signaled "strength, leadership, and other heroic qualities." The Tennessee Titans name, adopted in 1999, borrowed directly from Greek mythology's generation of…
From the Wed, Aug 12, 2026 roundup → - Tetris
Soviet programmer Alexey Pajitnov built "Tetris" in 1984 on a government computer in Moscow, naming it by combining the Greek prefix tetra- ("four," since every falling piece is made of four squares) with "tennis," reportedly his favorite sport. Untangling…
From the Sun, Aug 23, 2026 roundup → - Trampoline
American gymnast George Nissen built his first bouncing apparatus out of canvas and inner-tube rubber in 1934, inspired by watching circus acrobats rebound off safety nets. He patented it as a "Tumbling Device," but the catchier name came later, borrowed from…
From the Fri, Aug 14, 2026 roundup → - Treadmill
The first "treadmill" was not for fitness. English engineer William Cubitt introduced it in 1818 as a punishment for prisoners he considered idle, a huge wheel with steps that inmates climbed for hours, sometimes grinding grain or pumping water and sometimes…
From the Sat, Sep 26, 2026 roundup → - Trivia
"Trivia" comes from Latin trivium — literally "the place where three roads meet" (*tri-* "three" plus via "road"). In Roman towns, these three-way intersections were natural gathering spots where ordinary people swapped everyday news and casual gossip, which…
From the Thu, Aug 27, 2026 roundup → - Umpire
An umpire is, etymologically, someone who is "not equal" to either side of a dispute — which is exactly the point. The word comes from Old French nonper ("not equal," from non + per), which entered Middle English as "noumpere." Over time, "a noumpere" got…
From the Thu, Aug 6, 2026 roundup → - Under Armour
Kevin Plank, a special-teams captain on the University of Maryland football team in the mid-1990s, was tired of soaking through the cotton T-shirts he wore under his pads at every practice, and started experimenting with the moisture-wicking synthetic fabrics…
From the Sun, Sep 20, 2026 roundup → - Yacht
Dutch "jacht" means hunt, and a "jachtschip" was a fast, light vessel the Dutch navy used to chase pirates and smugglers in shallow water. In 1660, the City of Amsterdam presented one, the Mary, to Charles II to celebrate his restoration to the throne. The…
From the Tue, Sep 29, 2026 roundup → - Yahtzee
According to game-industry lore, a wealthy Canadian couple invented a dice game in 1954 to play with friends aboard their yacht — hence its earliest nickname, "the Yacht Game." Two years later they asked a toy entrepreneur to make a batch of sets as gifts; he…
From the Mon, Aug 31, 2026 roundup → - Yifter
At the 1980 Moscow Olympics, Ethiopian runner Miruts Yifter — competing at around age 40, with an Olympic career already marked by missed chances — won gold in both the 10,000m and 5,000m, becoming the first Ethiopian to take two golds at a single Games. His…
From the Mon, Aug 10, 2026 roundup → - YMCA
A 22-year-old London draper's assistant named George Williams gathered about a dozen friends in 1844 to found a support network for young men flooding into the city during the Industrial Revolution. That small group became a worldwide organization of…
From the Thu, Sep 3, 2026 roundup → - Yo-yo
The yo-yo as a toy has ancient roots stretching back to Greece and China, but its modern name and its American popularity both trace to the Philippines. Pedro Flores, a Filipino immigrant, began manufacturing and marketing the toy in California in the late…
From the Tue, Aug 18, 2026 roundup → - Zamboni
In 1949, Southern California ice-rink owner Frank Zamboni got tired of watching a five-person crew spend ninety minutes scraping, sweeping, washing, and re-flooding his rink's surface by hand between sessions. He built a single machine — cobbled together…
From the Wed, Aug 26, 2026 roundup →