tennis

Before a point began in the medieval French game of jeu de paume, the server would call out Tenez! to his opponent, meaning Take it! or Here it comes! The word is the second-person plural imperative of tenir, the French verb to hold, which itself descended from Latin tenere. English players borrowed both the game and the shout, and somewhere in the 14th century the call became the name.

The first written English form is tenys, found in a poem by John Gower around 1399, just after Henry IV of England played the game as a young man. Henry V famously received a gift of tennis balls from the French Dauphin in Shakespeare's Henry V, and though the scene is theatrical, the game itself was genuinely royal. French monarchs built elaborate indoor courts called tripots and paid professional players; English kings followed suit at Hampton Court, where the court built around 1625 still stands.

Real tennis, as the indoor version came to be called to distinguish it from the newer outdoor game, has asymmetric geometry: the court has sloping roofs, galleries, and buttresses that all affect play. Walter Clopton Wingfield adapted the game for lawns in 1873, calling his invention Sphairistike from the Greek word for ball-playing. The name did not survive. Within two years the Marylebone Cricket Club had standardized the rules and called it lawn tennis, which shortened to tennis by common use.

The French etymon tenere also gave English tenant, tenor, tenure, and tenacious. They all share a grip on something: a note held in music, a lease held on property, a quality that refuses to let go. Tennis, then, is etymologically the game of holding on. In every tight fifth set, that is exactly what it becomes.