Everybody loves playing games, and many of the world’s most popular can trace their ancestry back through hundreds, or even thousands of years of history. These games are so often familiar that we tend to take them for granted. Nowhere is this more apparent than when it comes to their names.
Below we’re going to uncover the often surprising history behind the names of two of our most beloved and enduring games.
Blackjack
Nowadays, blackjack is widely considered to be the most popular casino game in the world. It descends from a family of card games known variously as Twenty-Ones—a name which refers to the highest potential value of a winning hand that can be awarded.
Vingt-Un, Ventiuno and even Pontoon are all names that translate to, or are associated with this number value. That makes the name of the most popular member of this family, Blackjack, all the more intriguing for breaking with the format.
Interestingly, there are competing stories as to where the name comes from. The most popular is that it came from a promotion that used to run in the early 20th century gaming parlours. It was supposed that a player drawing an Ace of spades alongside one of the black-suited jacks—the Jack of clubs or spades—would be awarded a ten-to-one payout. This was called a 'blackjack'.
While there’s no smoke without fire, and it’s likely that such a convention took hold as blackjack grew in popularity, recent historical research puts the origin of the name further back into the gold rush era of North American expansion (1848–1880).
Vingt-un was a popular game among gold miners and prospectors in the American west at this time, and historian Thierry Depaulis notes that the name 'blackjack' likely came from them. Gold is known to appear in mineral deposits of zincblende, which we know today as sphalerite. Its dark color earned it the nickname of 'blackjack', and its discovery was a sure sign that gold was nearby. As such, finding 'blackjack' was akin to hitting the jackpot.
From this, it’s easy to see how the name likely transferred over to the winning hand of this popular card game. Nowadays, a new generation of tech-savvy gamers prefer to play online variants of this classic title on reputable platforms. Little do they realize that, in so doing, they’re walking in the footsteps of the people of this moment in history.
Chess
Few games are as long-lived, or have travelled as far and wide as chess. The traditional game of grand strategy took on its current form in the courts and kingdoms of Mediaeval feudal europe, but there are many elements of the modern game that speak to its deep ancestry.
Chess started life in the ancient Indian kingdom of the Gupta empire (275–467 CE), where it was known as Chaturanga—Sanskrit for 'four-limbs'. The four limbs in question refer to the traditional divisions of the Indian army of this time into war elephants, chariots, infantry and cavalry.
Today, we retain these pieces and refer to them as bishops, rooks, pawns and knights. Unsurprisingly, elephants, common in other parts of the globe, were in short supply in Europe, and the piece’s stylized tusks came to resemble the conical hats worn by bishops over time.
Rooks, which took on the appearance of castles in the modern game, can trace their name to an intermediate phase in Chess’ journey. The game moved along the silk road that carried trade, inventions and news between east and west for thousands of years. Chess became very popular in Sassanid Persia, and it is from this period that we find many of the modern terms we associate with the game, including its current name.
Rook comes from the old Persian 'Rukh', meaning chariot. Likewise, it is from the Persian name for King, Shah, that we get the name Chess. Interestingly, the German name for the game, Schach, retains a greater similarity with the original Persian. It was in the courts of Persia that the game also acquired its enigmatic phrase, 'check mate'. This is thought to be a corruption of the Persian phrase, 'the king is dead' — Shah Mat.
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