Word of the Day:
tiddlywinks
What It Means
A competitive game in which the objective is to flick as many small discs (each called a tiddlywink or wink) as possible into a container (the pot) by pressing on their edges with a larger disc (a shooter or squidger), causing them to jump up from the surface on which they are placed.
Especially in the form to play tiddlywinks: a meaningless or unimportant activity.
Tiddlywinks in Context
“Recreation rooms were provided for both boys and girl, and the long winter evenings were anything but dreary, for when school was done and work over the children gathered in the brilliantly lit, hot-pipe-heated rooms and played draughts, bagatelle, lotto, or tiddly-winks.”
Did You Know?
From tiddlywink + -s, possibly from tiddly (“(informal) little, tiny”) + wink (“blinking of one eye”), perhaps borrowed from tiddlywink, etymology 1 (“unlicensed beerhouse or pawnshop; game played using dominoes”, etc.). The game was patented by a British bank clerk, Joseph Assheton Fincher (1863–1900), on 19 October 1889, and the name Tiddledy-Winks trademarked by him the same year. Tiddlywinks is the preferred modern spelling; the earliest known use of this spelling dates from 1894.
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: tiddlywinks (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the word and reformatted its meaning, examples and origin.
Cite this entry: “tiddlywinks.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/tiddlywinks. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.
