Quick links
crokinole
< French croquignole 'a flick, flick (with the finger)'
DCHP-2 (Aug 2012)
n. — Games
a board game in which wooden discs are flicked towards the centre of a board (see Image 1).
Type: 5. Frequency — In this game, the objective is to place one's disc at the higher-scoring centre of the board, while also displacing the opponent's discs. The Canadian origin seems most likely (see, e.g. the 2015 quotation), yet the earliest quotation is from Milwaukee from 1885 (see OED-3, s.v. "crokinole"). As Chart 1 shows, the term is most frequently used in Canada.
See also COD-2, s.v. "crokinole", which marks it "Cdn.", and OED-3, which marks it "Chiefly Canad.".
See also COD-2, s.v. "crokinole", which marks it "Cdn.", and OED-3, which marks it "Chiefly Canad.".
Quotations
1886
A course of popular lectures have been arranged for, educational classes will be provided, all kinds of games (including the new game of crokinole), the illustrated papers, the principal magazines, and leading English and American papers, will be supplied to the reading room, which will be free to any young men.
1894
The Trinity men usually hit either too high or too low when batting, and were always in the wrong place when a catch came their way. On the other hand, the Toronto men found the pitcher a cinch, Campbell of '97 hitting him for a complete circuit of one time. The four first-year men on the Toronto team brought glory to their year, Hewish making a beautiful double play, and McNichol playing faultlessly at first. Trinity is now arranging for a crokinole match with the lady meds.
1905
The building was more than comfortably filled, and games of caroms, crokinole, chess, checkers etc. were kept going briskly during the evening, while a guessing game was also in progress, requiring the interpretation of sundry proverbs presented in pictorial form.
1949
Ralph Ronan, one of the guests at the Blue Mountain camp operated by the Ontario Society for Crippled Children, is an expert at the crokinole board.
1974
Their activities include?cutting beaver hay on the Canadian Shield [...] and even a Young People?s evening of crokinole at a local church.
1989
"There's a warm, family feeling about crokinole," said Kelly, who has written a book about the game.
2001
Two entries, one on crokinole and the other on ice, showed how a simple subject could become an engaging personal essay.
2006
While he still enjoys old-fashioned games -- he has three crokinole boards and loves "the flicking aspect and working the angles out" -- [Scott Alden] says that nowadays, the best games come from Europe, particularly from Germany.
2015
"A lot is unclear about the history of this game," Pinel says. Historians believe crokinole was invented in Tavistock, Ont., near Stratford, around 1860, but the creator's identity is a mystery. Legend has it the inventor thought the wooden discs, or pucks, looked like a type of French cookie, hence the game's unusual name ("croquignole" means biscuit in a French dialect).
Eckhardt Wettlaufer, a woodworker in nearby Sebastopol, Ont., crafted the first known crokinole board as a fifth birthday present for his son Adam in 1876. It's now part of the collection at the Joseph Schneider Haus, a national historic site in Kitchener with a focus on Germanic folk art.
References
- COD-2
- OED-3
Images
Image 1: A crokinole board. Source: Wikimedia Commons. Photo: Fgingras47
