“There you go, try to get this one”

What comes to our mind, when we think about ‘Tennis’?
Major tournaments? The stars? Or the millions of dollar they earn as prize money? Or the perks they enjoy as most top sports personalities?

Yes! Tennis is one of the costliest sport. It was once, The King of Games and the Game of Kings.

But today tennis enjoys millions of recreational players and it is also a hugely popular worldwide spectator sport.

‘Tennis’ as a sport was believed to be developed in France, was originally “tenez” and pronounces as ‘tuh-nay’. It is a French verb ‘tenir’; on translation it gives a meaning something like “there you go”. They were saying “tenez” when they hit the ball so as to say “there, there you go; try to get this one”.

But tennis lost popularity in France and gained popularity in England. So English people were using the word “tenez” each time they hit the ball, but saying it in English accent, sounded more like “tennis”, which eventually took the new spelling.

Why does tennis use the scores ‘fifteen’, ‘thirty’, and ’fourty’?
In the original scoring system, players had to win four points to win a game and four games to win a set. The points were recorded on a clock face, with one point for each quarter. So it became common to refer to the first point as fifteen, because it’s the first quarter. Thirty became the second point for the same reason. Forty five was shortened to fourty. That marked the third quarter. And the game had been won when the fourth quarter at the top of the clock face.

Then what about ‘love all’? Hope you do not need telling, as ‘Love’ means nothing, zero, no points in a game. There is a possibility that this may have come from the English pronunciation of the French word ‘I’oeuf, meaning ‘the egg’.

Tennis has another unusual score too. That is ‘deuce’, which comes from ‘deux’, a French word for ‘two’. Deuce is used when both players have scored forty and need two points to win the game.The modern tennis has all of this and more.