More Early English Games: The Endnotes

Some further details about AngloSaxon games and some modern gaming terms, related to the knucklebones I discussed in "What was the earliest English word?"

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Welcome to the Endnotes, where I put all the fun facts I can’t fit into the main videos! Today, an extra bit of information from my video about the earliest English word — and if you haven’t seen that yet, click on the card.

The Germanic peoples like the Anglo-Saxons had a variety of games other than the knucklebones mentioned in the video, such as riddles, as well as many boardgames called collectively tæfl games or literally “table” games, so the original tabletop gaming! The ancient Greeks and Romans too had a board game called tables, tabula in Latin and table in Greek. Tabula is the direct ancestor of our modern backgammon, and in fact that second element gammon is just the Old English form of the word game. Dice have also been found in the archaeological record of Anglo-Saxon England, so we can imagine them playing a variety of dice games, like craps. In fact the direct ancestor to the game craps was a game called hazard (that’s where we get the modern word hazard as in “risk or danger” from). The word and presumably the game were imported through French, from Spanish, probably ultimately from the Arabic word for dice. But the word doesn’t appear in English until about 1300, so well after the Anglo-Saxon period. Nevertheless, we have Anglo-Saxon dice and the Old English word tæfl could also be used to refer to them. And this brings up the notion of gambling which no doubt the Anglo-Saxons engaged in. There was an Old English verb from this game root, gamenian meaning “to play or joke”, which eventually leads to our word gamble. Another gambling related word that comes out of the middle ages is pool, which originally referred to the collective stakes in any game of gambling, before eventually coming to refer to a particular type of billiards game. Surprisingly, it doesn’t come from the notion of pool as in a pool of water, but instead from the French word for chicken, poule. Supposedly it’s from a game called jeu de poule “game of chicken” in which, believe it or not, the chicken is the target, and if you hit it you win the chicken, and from there pool expanded to refer to the winnings in any game. However, in English it probably comes to be associated with the other type of pool, reinforced supposedly by the fact that French fiche in the sense of “game counter”, sounds a lot like English fish. If you believe that fish story! But pool brings us back to the word English, which can mean ‘spin on the ball’ in a game of billiards or pool. English comes to have this slang sense since angled in French, anglé, unsurprisingly sounds like Anglais meaning “English”, or perhaps because the technique of putting English on the ball was introduced by English players (but I wouldn’t bet on it).

As always, you can hear even more etymology and history, as well as interviews with a wide range of fascinating people, on the Endless Knot Podcast, available on all the major podcast platforms as well as our other YouTube channel. Thanks for watching!