SPHAIRISTIKE/sfɛəˈrɪstɪkɪ/

A ball game that developed into lawn tennis.

This is the name of an ancient Greek ball game that Major Walter Wingfield borrowed for the recreation he patented in 1874, in part a conflation of elements borrowed from earlier games: the net from badminton, the ball from fives, and the scoring from racquets. If that name had caught on, we would now be watching the Wimbledon Sphairistike Championships. Luckily for sports commentators it didn’t, for the very good reason that only those few people well versed in ancient Greek knew how to say it. Most converted it into a three-syllable word that roughly rhymed with “pike”. This was soon abbreviated either to sticky or the mock-French stické. However, in his patent, Major Wingfield also called it lawn tennis, chosen to distinguish it from the much older indoor game often called court tennis. A modified version of his game immediately became hugely popular under that name, though it was soon abbreviated just to tennis, so that the aficionados of the older game in snobbish retaliation started to call theirs real tennis, a term later mistakenly converted to royal tennis in Britain and some other countries.

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