Origin of marbles game

Harper, D. Etymology of marbles. Online Etymology Dictionary. Harper, Douglas. Marbles usually earn their nickname based upon what they look like, what they're used for, or the material used to make them.

For example, "aggies" are marbles that are made from agate, a type of stone. An "alley" can be a marble made of alabaster, but it can also be another term for a "shooter" or "taw," the large marble used to knock around the smaller ones, which are sometimes called "mibs" or "ducks. Sometimes the figurine is an animal, a character like Santa Claus , or even a real person like Teddy Roosevelt, at left.

And if you can spot any of these marbles on sight, you're probably a "mibster," a term for someone who plays marbles. In-game slang includes many phrases that have made it into the everyday lexicon.

For example, to "knuckle down" means to put your hand in a position to shoot your marble, keeping at least one knuckle on the ground at all times. If you're about to take an easy shot with your taw, you can say the marble you're aiming for is a "dead duck. Oddly enough, the origin of the phrase, "losing your marbles" can't definitively be traced back to the game of marbles.

However, if you were to lose all your marbles in a "for keeps" game, you probably would go a little bit crazy. You might think you know how to play marbles, but I'm afraid you don't. That's because there is no single game called "marbles. To play Ringers, two mibsters arrange 13 ducks in an X at the center of a 10' diameter ring. The mibsters take turns knuckling down with their shooters and firing into the ducks, scattering them. Any ducks that leave the ring are worth one point each.

If his shooter stays in the ring, the mibster can keep shooting ducks, earning more points. However, once his shooter leaves the ring, it's the next mibster's turn. In the game of Archboard, the players take turns bowling their marbles at a "bridge" with nine Roman arches. If, a marble enters into an arch then, the player scores the number of points shown at the top of the arch. A total of 45 points are required to win. In the game of Ring Taw, the players flick their shooter marble toward a target marble in a circle 10 feet in diameter.

If a target marble is knocked out of the circle, then the player scores a point. The player with the most points scored wins. The essentials of shooting 'nuts' and marbles is to shoot or bowl at some form of a target. In the ancient world Roman children were not the only children to play games with marbles.

However, it is not known what these games may have been. The oldest marbles that have been found date to BC. They were a group of rounded semi-precious stones that were buried with an Egyptian Child at Nagada. In North America engraved marbles have been found in ancient Native American earthen mounds Britannica.

Now in discovering where our modern names for 'marbles' originate from is of historical interest to the marble collector. The French word for a toy marble is 'bille' which means 'little ball'. The word 'bille' appears as early as the 12 th century Dauzat's Etymological Dictionary.

When a fire destroyed their Novelty Glass Company factory, the two brothers rebuilt the glassworks and renamed it the Pelterier Glass Company. In the early 's, Peltier Glass began to make a line of marbles producing brightly colored slags, swirls, corkscrews, and agates. It became one of the leading marble manufacturers from the s to the s.

In addition to its regular line of marbles, Pelteir produced picture marbles, a popular series of twelve marbles that each had a decal of a contemporary comic-strip characters such as Betty Boop and Any Gump.

Today these marbles are known to collectors as comics. Christensen Agate Company — Christensen glass was founded in and produced some of the most beautiful early machine made marbles. Victims of the early years of the Great Depression, Christensen Agate went out of business in Because of its short existence and the company's limited capacity, Christiensen marbles are relative scarce.

Today this company's guineas, cobras, flames, slags, and opaque swirls are among the most valuable and sought after machine made marbles. According to company records, Ravenswood produced around one hundred million marbles per year.

When Ravenswood was unable to compete with the Japanese Cat's eyes that flooded the market in the early 's, the company went out of business. Today you can find hand made glass marbles made by artists from around the world, and machine made marbles produced in vast quantities. The centuries old composition of glass used for handmade marbles, sand, soda ash and lime is the same basic glass used for machine made marbles.

Other ingredients added include zinc oxide, aluminum hydrate, and various coloring agents. In the manufacturing process, the glass is melted in a large furnace to a temperature of 2, degrees Fahrenheit for up to twenty-eight hours, until it reaches the consistency of molasses. At this point, the molten batter pours through an opening in the furnace, where shears cut the glass into equal pieces. These pieces move through rollers and cool rapidly, hardening into marbles as they are transported.

They then drop into metal containers for annealing. Once cooled, the marbles are inspected, sorted, and packaged for sale. Billions of machine-made marbles have been produced during this century. Machine-made marbles reached the peak of their popularity in the late s and s when competition between manufacturers made marbles plentiful and cheap.