By the sixteenth century, for example, that peculiarly English characteristic, the love of sport, had already begun to make its mark on the language. _Sport_ itself is an abbreviation of ‘disport’, a French word meaning ‘to carry oneself in a different direction from that of one’s ordinary business’. It is interesting to observe how both the form and meaning of the English word have diverged from their origin, and how they have since been reborrowed into French and most of the other languages of Europe. Italian tailors will even use the vocable to describe a roll of loud check cloth! Of the older sports, hawking has given us _allure_, _haggard_, _rebate_, and _reclaim_. The Latin ‘reclamare’ had meant ‘to cry out against’ or ‘to contradict’; it was only in hawking that it acquired its present sense of ‘calling back’ from the cries that were uttered to summon the hawk back to the wrist. _Allure_ is from the old _lure_, an apparatus for recalling the birds, and _haggard_ is a word of obscure etymology which was used of a wild hawk. _Forte_ and _foible_ are old fencing terms, describing the strong and weak (_feeble_) points of a sword. _Couple_, _muse_, _relay_, _retrieve_ (French ‘retrouver’), _run riot_, _ruse_, _sagacious_, _tryst_, and _worry_ we owe to hunting, as also the development of the Latin ‘sentire’ into the English word _scent_. Of these the most interesting are perhaps _muse_, which is supposed to be derived from the same word as _muzzle_, and _ruse_, another form of _rush_. The hounds were said to ‘muzzle’ when they sniffed the air in doubt about the scent, and a _ruse_ was a doubling of the hunted animal on its own tracks. _Rove_ (but not _rover_) is from archery, meaning in the first place ‘to shoot arrows at an arbitrarily selected target’. _Bias_, _bowl over_, and _rub_ in the phrase ‘there’s the rub’ are from bowls, _crestfallen_ and _white feather_ from cockfighting, and _chess_, _check_, _checkmate_, _cheque_, and _chequer_ come to us through the Arabian from Persian, the central word being a corruption of the Persian ‘Shah mat’, meaning ‘The Shah (the King) is dead’. It is not so generally known that all the varied meanings of these words are metaphors taken either from the game or from the board on which it is played. The more modern sports do not yet seem to have provided us with many new words, but there is a promising tendency to transmute some of their technical terms into lively idiom. In this way we can use, for example, to _sprint_, to _put on a spurt_, the _last lap_, _clean bowled_, to _take his middle stump_, to _skate on thin ice_, to _kick off_, to _tee off_, _one up_,...; and modern games have also been instrumental in preserving from oblivion the odd old French word _bisque_, of unknown origin, which came over to England with the now nearly obsolete game of tennis, as well as the French-Scottish _caddie_.