What we know as “tennis” is not the original game of tennis. The original tennis is probably derived from the French word “tenez,” which means “look out!” — probably because it’s a game in which somebody uses a racquet to hit a ball at you as hard as they can.
Tennis was played as early as the 12th century or so, and originated in France. It was played indoors, and involved hitting a ball over a net by using a racquet. It was quite popular in the late 1500s; supposedly there were around 250 tennis courts in Paris in 1596.
Then in 1874 a man named Wingfield invented a new game called “sphairistike.” He actually patented it, in England. The game was played outdoors and combined a badminton net, a ball, a new system of scoring, and a simple set of rules. Everybody seemed to like the game, but nobody liked its name. Nobody was even sure how to pronounce sphairistike, which was a word from ancient Greek that meant “ability at ball-playing.” Most people assumed it rhymed with “pike”, although in Greek it’s closer to rhyming with “tiki”. Some people wrote it as if it was originally French: sphairistiké.
In any case, the game was pretty quickly called lawn tennis instead, since it pretty closely resembled the old indoor game. Even Wingfield himself eventually referred to it as lawn tennis in the many ads he placed selling boxes of equipment and rules (for five guineas each).
The game caught on pretty quickly, although people who enjoyed older, more established sports started out by disparaging it. The Daily News in 1874 printed: “We also observed a further accessory for the amusement of ladies in the shape of ‘Lawn Tennis,’ on the croquet ground at the north side of the carriage drive.”
Because you could play lawn tennis outside even if you didn’t have a big building with a tennis court, the popularity of lawn tennis soon surpassed regular tennis, and the names of the sports traded places — “lawn tennis” became simply “tennis,” and the other “tennis” began to be called “real tennis,” “courte-paume” in French-speaking countries, and “royal tennis” in England. Like several other games, “royal tennis” has also been called the sport of kings. Royal tennis is still played today, but not so much — there are fewer than 50 courts in the entire world as far as anyone knows.
As for sphairistike, well, there’s probably a big tournament somewhere; maybe it’ll be on TV this weekend.
