[Ads-l] Antedating of "Sphairistike"

[Shapiro, Fred]

The 25 February 1874 citation for "lawn tennis" below is also an antedating of "Sphairistike" (OED 1874 [21 March]).

Fred Shapiro


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From: American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU> on behalf of Shapiro, Fred <00001ac016895344-dmarc-request at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
Sent: Sunday, August 30, 2026 07:01
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
Subject: Corrected Antedating of "Lawn Tennis"

I have previously posted about an 1873 citation for the term "lawn tennis" (OED 1874).  I have now looked at Heiner Gillmeister's very scholarly book Tennis: A Cultural History.  Gillmeister demonstrates that the 1873 citation is erroneous.  He pinpoints the earliest appearance of the "lawn tennis" term with the following dating:

"On 25 February 1874, two days after the patent had been granted, [Walter Clopton] Wingfield's Rules of the Game appeared in print.  ... On the title page of the small booklet (no more than eight printed pages) the game was referred to ... as 'Sphairistike or Lawn Tennis' ... The Greek name appeared in Greek letters on top of the page whereas Lawn Tennis was printed onto a Wingfieldian tennis net running diagonally across it in the form of a band.  Inside, the game was called 'The Major's Game of Lawn Tennis.'"

Gillmeister (page 175) reproduces the cover of the rule booklet.

Fred Shapiro

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From: Shapiro, Fred <fred.shapiro at yale.edu>
Sent: Monday, August 10, 2026 06:53
To: Shapiro, Fred <fred.shapiro at yale.edu>
Subject: Antedating of "Lawn Tennis"

The OED's first citation for "lawn tennis" is dated 1874.  Michael Seibold's Ph.D. Thesis (University of Edinburgh, 2009), titled "European Tennis: A Comparative Analysis of Talent Identification and Development (TID)," prints on page 23 the cover page of Walter Clopton Wingfield's 1873 pamphlet "Sphairistike or Lawn Tennis."  Apparently Seibold reproduced
this image from H. Gillmeister's 1997 book "Tennis: A Cultural History."  I have not yet examined the Gillmeister book.

Fred Shapiro


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