A Brief History of Tennis

Two beginnings

The modern game grew out of two separate inventions. Between 1859 and 1865 in Birmingham, Major Harry Gem, a solicitor, and his friend Augurio Perera, a Spanish merchant, blended elements of rackets and the Spanish ball game pelota and played the result on a croquet lawn in Edgbaston. The pair moved to Leamington Spa in 1872 and, with two doctors from the Warneford Hospital, founded the world’s first tennis club there in 1874.

In December 1873 Major Walter Clopton Wingfield devised and patented a similar game for the amusement of guests at a garden party on his estate at Nantclwyd in Llanelidan, Wales. He called it Sphairistikè, from the ancient Greek for skill at playing with a ball, and it was soon known simply as “sticky”. He drew on the developing outdoor game and on real tennis, published an eight-page rule book, “Sphairistike or Lawn Tennis”, in 1874, and never managed to enforce his patent. Much of the game’s vocabulary dates from this period.

Where the words come from

Wingfield borrowed the name and much of the French vocabulary of real tennis:

• Tennis comes from tenez, the French imperative of tenir, to hold: the server’s cry in royal tennis, meaning “I am about to serve”, much like “Fore!” in golf.
• Racquet comes from raquette, which in turn derives from the Arabic rakhat, the palm of the hand.
• Deuce comes from à deux le jeu, “to both is the game”: the two players have equal scores.
• Love for zero may derive from l’oeuf, the French for egg, for the shape of a nought.
• 15, 30 and 40 come from quinze, trente and quarante, or from the quarters of a clock face, with 45 shortened to 40.

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