Word.ws English Dictionary

hnefatafl

hnefatafl noun: an ancient Norse board game.

Noun

hnefatafl (uncountable)

  1. (historical) An ancient Norse board game.
    • The Saxon game of Hnefatafl came from Denmark, a game which was played there about A.D. 400 and brought by them to Iceland and Britain. An English manuscript written during the reign of King Athelstan, 925-40, contains a diagram of this game.1971, Gwen White, Antique Toys And Their Background, page 115

Origin of hnefatafl

Borrowed from Old Norse hnefatafl (“board game of the fist”), made of hnefi (“fist, the king piece of the hnefatafl game”) and tafl (“a table, a board game”). The historical Norse coined this term to differentiate it from other board games, such as skáktafl (“chess”), kvatrutafl (“tables”), and halatafl (“fox games”).

Questions about hnefatafl

What does hnefatafl mean?
Hnefatafl means an ancient Norse board game.
What part of speech is hnefatafl?
Hnefatafl is a noun.

Words near hnefatafl in the dictionary

  1. HND
  2. hndbk.
  3. hndbks.
  4. HNDL
  5. HNDs
  6. hnefatafl
  7. HNEL
  8. HNELs
  9. HNF
  10. HNG
  11. hngh

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: hnefatafl (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.

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