Etymology

We all know what a jackpot is and we all hope to win it someday. Especially when it's full. But what about etymologically the jack and the pot and how did they come together in the word jackpot. The word Jackpot consists of two parts. We have the boy name Jack and the dishes you can put something in. It's interesting to have those two words in it...

The words flop and flap can both be seen in use at online casinos. if you make stupid mistakes, your game is a flop or you are a flop yourself. And the fun slot machines pay you with a flap. After that, of course, you hope to win flaps. Origin of the word flap for the origin of the words flop and flap we have to go to England. The two words came into use around 1600....

A visitor to this site pointed us to the word fun. According to her, profit and (game)fun are the main drivers for people to take a gamble. We already wrote about this from scientific research, but not from word explanation. Therefore, here first the word pleasure. About how to derive the word pleasure, etymologists do not make it difficult. According to them, that comes from the Latin verb placēre. That's where a lot of them start...

The word win is special in etymology. When you play a game, you often know when you are going to win. If you get more money back from a slot machine than you threw in, then you have made a profit. If you have more points than your opponent in a match, you win. Except in a match where you have to get as few points as possible. But with the rules of the game at hand...

Most New Zealand gamblers will know the word Cruks by now. It stands for Central Register of exclusion of games of chance. You may wonder if the abbreviation was there before the completeness, for which it stands. Then you see in mind the Communication Department of the Gambling Authority. Jan Erik van der Werff, head of communication at the KSA, then says something like ‘attendees we are going to create a database of people with a gambling problem. They can do that themselves...

We could easily call it the mother of probability theory. However, mathematicians such as Pascal and Huygens were soon done with it afterwards. They preferred to look at the possibilities offered by the dice. Instead of a 50% chance, as with heads or tails, the possibilities increased. Especially with two dices. Actually, this should be a message about the etymology of heads or tails. But more interesting than the origin of it...

We will be watching a lot of matches this summer. And more and more people are betting on the outcome of a match. That's not crazy. After all, the word match comes from betting. A match is a meeting in which two or more people or parties compete for a result, which bystanders can bet on. Indeed, historically, the word contest comes from two separate words: bet and battle. And we already tell you that it is from the German...

Two colleagues talked about Sic Bo on the editorial board of Architects Creative. It seemed to be about a television show. A conversation about a sick Beau van Erven Dorens. But so it was about new online games based on the Chinese dice game Sic Bo. With that knowledge, we enthusiastically went in search of the etymology of the word Sic Bo. It became a bizarre search through Chinese websites, American books on gambling and more. And again...

The word Baccarat has an opaque history. When we discover that several scientists have done research on the card game baccarat, we have hope. Most of them begin with a short history. But there are even two studies entitled ‘History of Baccarat’. We open a first of the two and read: ‘the game of baccarat, which generated more than 41 billion in revenue for casinos in Macau in 2013 ...’. The total turnover of casinos...

The etymology of the word patience seems simple. Nevertheless, we run into some peculiarities. As we saw in a previous article on Architects Creative, when we looked at the history of Patience. The word patience means patience, suffering, rest and the like. With those words, especially at this time, we quickly see someone lying in a bed. That's not surprising, the word patience has the same origin as our word patient. A word that...

In the history of poker, we wrote that many countries claim the origin of the game of poker. We didn't mention two names in that story that are interesting to the history and etymology of the word poker: Richard F. Foster and Stewart Culin. The second one you may remember from the post about games of Indians. Culin was a gambling historian who traveled to many countries to gather information about gambling games. Richard Foster...

There are many stories about the history of the game and the word craps. No message dares to go beyond pronouncing a probability. About the game craps we already wrote on Architects Creative. This is the word craps. But that turns out to be closely linked to the history of the game. We've been able to read it before. The Frenchman Bernard de Marigny, who has lived in America for three generations, brought the Mandeville...