We seldom think about where things get their names from, especially when referring to commonplace things that we take for granted. Both games and sports are a great example of this as there are dozens of each that are popular today the world over. We may assume that these games were always the same, and went by the same name, but this is rarely true.
In actuality, most popular games we know and love have evolved over sometimes thousands of years. Games we take for granted also often have surprising origins, and often these origins are concealed within their names. Below we’re looking at a couple of widespread and popular classic games with the aim to get to the bottom of whence their, sometimes curious, names originate.
The Game of Kings
This prestigious game of strategy has travelled long and far to arrive in its present incarnation. The earliest examples of this game come from the Gupta empire of classical India. There it was (and still is) referred to as chaturanga, a Sanskrit word meaning “four-limbs”. These four limbs were the divisions of the pieces, which survive in the modern western version as the knights, rooks, pawns and bishops.
Chess’ name comes by way of its stopping along the silk road in Sassanid Persia. There, the game became known as shah, which is Persian for king. It is this term that, through mistranslation, arrived in Europe as chess, or the closer sounding schach, in German. As such, chess can be thought to mean “the game of kings”.
Further remnants of this Persian influence survive in our modern game in the enigmatic term “checkmate”. This is a specialist term used in chess to describe a state of play where one player feels they have cornered, and are about to imminently capture their opponent’s king, thus securing victory. It is believed that this term comes from the Persian “shah mat”, meaning quite literally, “the king is dead”.
Hidden Gold
Arguably the most popular card game played in the world today, blackjack has been around in its present incarnation for over a hundred years, but its true origin likely goes much further back. This is all the more outstanding when you consider that blackjack continues to evolve right up to the present day, where online variants of its classic format are being enjoyed by a new generation of tech-savvy gamers.
Blackjack is the best known and most prominent member of a family of dealer-led banking games known as twenty-ones. They are collectively referred to by this number because that is the value of a winning hand in these games. In fact, virtually all of blackjack’s ancestors are referred to by this number in their respective languages, from vingt-un in French, to veintiuno in Spanish. Even the British variant, pontoon, is actually a mis-translation of vingt-un. This makes the fact that blackjack has an altogether unique name all the more surprising.
There are several ideas about where the name blackjack comes from. The most popular myth is that blackjack refers to a promotion that was run in North American saloons in the early part of the 20th century, wherein players would get a bonus if they won with a hand featuring one of the two black-suited jacks in a standard 52-card deck. Though this myth has a nice ring to it, there’s little evidence for this being the origin of the term.
Card historian Thierry Depaulis has researched the matter, and puts the origins of the term back in the 1800s during the Klondike gold-rush. Apparently, blackjack was a nickname commonly used among the miners to refer to a mineral known as zincblende. This material is note-worthy because it was commonly found alongside deposits of gold and silver. Hence, finding zincblende would be the equivalent of finding a winning hand, and from there the name is thought to have stuck! Now there’s a fact you can use to impress your friends next time you play.
