Word.ws English Dictionary

Calvinball

Calvinball noun: a deliberately absurd sport without fixed rules.

Noun

Calvinball (uncountable)

  1. A deliberately absurd sport without fixed rules.
    • And every time I would play serious tackle Nerf Calvinball out in the park somewhere, it played over and over in the back of my mind -- what would I do if I broke an arm?1996 June 17, Wayne Lockwood, "Nobody without health insurance is a slacker or a loser", Knight-Ridder
    • At first my humans very much disliked it when I played croquet with them.... But eventually they decided to accept my participation, and renamed the game “Calvinball,” after the game of some comic book character1998, Chris Glaser, Unleashed: The Wit and Wisdom of Calvin the Dog, Westminster John Knox Press, →ISBN, page 71

Examples of Calvinball in a sentence

  • They are required to play the game of Nomic, in some form, or alternatively, the games Calvinball or Mao, which are basically the same.2005, The Grate^([sic]) Book of Moo, Church of MOO, Lulu.com, →ISBN, page ccclvii:
  • A more unusual sport is calvinball, which involves spontaneous rules that are never the same twice.2006, Lee Mothes, The New Island Relocation Guide: How to Live on the Island of Possibility, →ISBN, page 50:
  • Chick Lit, and pretty much all of publishing, plays a lot like Calvinball.2006, Cathy Yardley, Will Write for Shoes: How to Write a Chick Lit Novel, St. Martin's Press, →ISBN, page 148:
  • If the limitations of life were like the rules in Calvinball, someone like Nozick might ask if there would be anything left for people to do.2007, David H. Guston, John Parsi, Justin Tosi, “Anticipating the Ethical and Political Challenges of Human Nanotechnologies”, in Fritz...

Origin of Calvinball

From Calvin + ball. From a fictional game without rules, played in the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes.

Questions about Calvinball

What does Calvinball mean?
Calvinball means a deliberately absurd sport without fixed rules.
How do you use Calvinball in a sentence?
They are required to play the game of Nomic, in some form, or alternatively, the games Calvinball or Mao, which are basically the same.
What part of speech is Calvinball?
Calvinball is a noun.

Words near Calvinball in the dictionary

  1. Calvillo
  2. Calvillos
  3. Calvin
  4. Calvin cycle
  5. Calvin cycles
  6. Calvinball
  7. Calvine
  8. calving
  9. calving jack
  10. calving jacks
  11. calvings

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Calvinball (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “Calvinball.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/calvinball. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.