Cabinet · Case XV, Definitions

Glossary of Play

The working vocabulary of this archive: terms of art from archaeology, gaming and mathematics, defined briefly and dated where dating is possible.

Every field of history accretes a private language, and gaming history borrows from three at once: the archaeologists’ Latin, the players’ slang, and the mathematicians’ Latin again. This drawer defines the terms used across the cabinet, alphabetically, with cross-references to the drawers where each word does its work. Words in small capitals elsewhere in the archive are defined here.

A–D

• Alea / aleae: Latin for die (dice) and, by extension, fate itself; alea iacta est, “the die is cast.” Roman gaming law used aleator for the professional player. See dice.
• Astragalus, the knucklebone of a sheep or goat; the first randomizer, with four landable sides and a natural bias. Also called talus. See dice.
• Bar: in the tables family, the ridge dividing the board where hit pieces wait to re-enter; the element that gives “backgammon” its usual etymology.
• Biribi, an Italian board of numbered squares bet upon like a lottery; an ancestor absorbed by roulette.
• Card money, playing cards cut and signed for use as currency (famously in French colonial Canada, 1685); evidence of how trusted the printed card was.
• Doubling cube: backgammon’s stake-doubling device, introduced in 1920s New York; the first classic game redesigned around explicit probability judgment. See backgammon.
• Duodecim scripta: “twelve marked lines,” the Roman three-row race game played with three dice; ancestor of tabula and backgammon.

E–L

• En prison: the French roulette rule imprisoning even-money bets on zero for a second spin; halves the house edge further. See roulette.
• Expectation (expected value) (the probability-weighted average outcome of a wager); the concept invented in the Pascal–Fermat letters and the engine of all insurance and casino arithmetic since.
• Faro (the fast banking card game of 19th-century America), descended from French pharaon; notorious for rigged “brace” banks. See cheating.
• Hazard: the medieval dice game, from Arabic al-zahr (the die); ancestor of craps, and the source of the English word “hazard.” See dice.
• House edge, the gap between true odds and the payout offered; the zero’s 2.7% on a European wheel is the canonical example.
• Keno (the draw game descended from Han-dynasty Chinese lotteries; carried to America in the 19th century. See lotteries.
• Kleroterion) the Athenian allotment machine: a stone slab of slots and tokens for choosing officials by lot. See sortition.
• Law of large numbers: Jacob Bernoulli’s 1713 theorem: observed frequencies converge to true probabilities as trials multiply: the reason the long run is the house’s home. See probability.

M–P

• Mancala: the African and Asian family of sowing-and-counting games played with seeds in pits; notable as pure calculation, chance-free. See world tour.
• Nard, the Persian race game of twenty-four points, praised in the Shahnameh as the game of fate opposed to chess. See backgammon.
• Patolli, the Mesoamerican cross-track race game thrown with marked beans; wagering recorded by Spanish chroniclers. See world tour.
• Pachisi: “twenty-five,” India’s cowrie-shell cross-board race; ancestor of ludo. See world tour.
• Pips (the spots on dice and the suit marks counted on cards; “pip” also names the marker of rank on playing cards.
• Point, problem of) the interrupted-game stakes question solved by Pascal and Fermat in 1654; the founding problem of probability.
• Primero / poque (the 16th-century gambling card games in the direct ancestry of poker.

S–Z

• Senet) Egypt’s thirty-square race game from c. 3100 BCE, laden with afterlife meaning; four boards were buried with Tutankhamun. See the oldest boards.
• Sortition, decision or appointment by lot, from Athens to the Hebrew scriptures; divination’s civic sibling. See dice and lotteries.
• Spread, in modern cartomancy, the layout in which cards are drawn and read; a 19th–20th-century development on the older tarot game.
• Tables, the medieval and Renaissance family of race games on points, from tabula; backgammon’s immediate family name. See backgammon.
• Trionfi / tarocchi, “triumphs”: the 15th-century Italian trump-suit addition to the card pack that became the tarot; the source of “trump.”
• Trump, the permanent winning suit of a trick-taking game, invented with trionfi in 1430s Italy; now the grammar of whist, bridge, euchre and a hundred games since.
• Zero (wheel), the pocket that pays nothing and takes everything: the engineered margin, reduced to one green division by the Blancs at Bad Homburg in the 1840s. See roulette.

Using the glossary

The definitions are deliberately short: a word’s full story lives in its drawer. For the chronological order in which these terms entered the record, consult the timeline; for the arc that connects astragalus to expectation, the short history; for the cabinet’s purpose and rules, the editorial charter. The tour of the surviving objects begins in the museums drawer.