Word.ws English Dictionary

span counter

span counter noun: an old English children's game, in which one throws a counter on the ground, and another tries to hit it with his counter, or to get his counter so near it that he can span the space between them, and touch both the counters.

Noun

span counter (uncountable)

  1. An old English children's game, in which one throws a counter on the ground, and another tries to hit it with his counter, or to get his counter so near it that he can span the space between them, and touch both the counters.
    • Henry the Fifth, in whose time boys went to span-counter for French crowns1591 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Second Part of Henry the Sixt, […]”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies. […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and...
    • Boss out, or boss and span, also called hit or span, wherein one bowls a marble to any distance that he pleases, which serves as a mark for his antagonist to bowl at, whose business it is to hit the marble first bowled, or lay his own near enough to it for him to span the space between them and...1845, Joseph Strutt (1749-1802), The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England, page 384

Questions about span counter

What does span counter mean?
Span counter means an old English children's game, in which one throws a counter on the ground, and another tries to hit it with his counter, or to get his counter so near it that he can span the space between them, and touch both the counters.
What part of speech is span counter?
Span counter is a noun.

Words near span counter in the dictionary

  1. spamwich
  2. spamwiches
  3. span
  4. span block
  5. span blocks
  6. span counter
  7. span iron
  8. span irons
  9. span of control
  10. span roof
  11. span roofs

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: span counter (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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