billart

Billart is Old French for a wooden stick, from bille (a log, a tree trunk), probably from Celtic *bilia (a tree trunk). The game of billiards began as an outdoor lawn game in fifteenth-century France, similar to ground billiards or croquet. Players used a mace — a stick with a wide, flat head — to push balls through hoops on grass. At some point in the 1400s, the game moved indoors, onto a table covered in green cloth to simulate grass, with raised bumpers to keep the balls from rolling off.

Louis XIV was an avid billiards player, and the game became a fixture of French court life. By the seventeenth century, the mace had been replaced by the cue (from queue, French for tail) — players found that the narrow tail end of the mace could be used more precisely for striking. The invention of the cue tip — a leather cap that allowed spin and English (from the French word anglé, angled) — transformed the game from pushing to striking.

England, America, and France all developed their own billiards variants. English billiards uses three balls. French carom billiards uses no pockets. American pool uses fifteen numbered balls and six pockets. Snooker, invented by British Army officers in India in 1875, uses twenty-two balls. All are called 'billiards' in the broad sense, and each considers itself the true version.

The green baize of a billiards table is the last surviving trace of the original lawn. The cloth is green because the grass was green. The bumpers — called cushions — are the walls that replaced the garden hedges. The indoor game is a miniaturized, perfected version of the outdoor one. The French log that gave the word its name has been refined into a precisely engineered cue. The wood is the same. Everything else changed.