Hopscotch

Hopscotch

Hopscotch is a children's game that can be played with several players or alone. Hopscotch is a popular playground game in which players toss a small object into numbered spaces of a pattern of rectangles outlined on the ground and then hop or jump through the spaces to retrieve the object.

There are apocryphal stories of hopscotch being invented by Romans or Chinese, but the first recorded references to the game in English date back to the late 17th century, usually under the name 'scotch-hop' or 'scotch-hopper(s)'. A manuscript Book of Games compiled between 1635 and 1672 by Francis Willughby refers to 'Scotch Hopper‥. They play with a piece of tile or a little flat piece of lead, upon a boarded floore, or anie area divided into oblong figures like boards'. In Poor Robin’s Almanack for 1677, the game is referred to as "Scotch-hoppers." The entry states, "The time when schoolboys should play at Scotch-hoppers." The 1707 edition of Poor Robin’s Almanack includes the following phrase… "Lawyers and Physicians have little to do this month, so they may (if they will) play at Scotch-hoppers." In 1828 Webster's An American Dictionary of the English language also referred to the game as 'Scotch-hopper'...'a play in which boys hop over scotches and lines in the ground.

There are many other forms of hopscotch played across the globe. In India it is called Stapu or Kith-Kith, in Spain it's Rayuela. In Latin America, golosa. In Russian it is known as классики (diminutive for the word meaning classes). In Poland, it is called klasy, meaning classes. In Italy it is called campana (meaning bell), or mondo (meaning world). In the Netherlands and Flanders, Hinkelen. In Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia it is called školica, meaning little school. In Malaysia the most popular variant is called tengteng. In Mexico, it is called bebeleche (mamaleche) meaning drink milk or avioncito meaning little plane ("probably because of the shape"). In Puerto Rico it is called "peregrina" (meaning "pilgrim"- female noun). In Romania the game is called șotron and is widely played by children all over the country. In Brazil it is called amarelinha. The name evolved from marelle, the French name for the game, but was identified to the radical amarelo (yellow) and its diminutive in -inho/a. In Breton, the name is reg or delech. The Albanian variant is called rrasavi, which is composed of two words: rrasa ("the flat stone", an object used to play the game) and vi ("line", a reference to the lines that comprise the diagram of the course). In Philippines, hopscotch is called "piko" (pee-ko).

The game's generic name in Persian is Laylay. The most common form of Laylay in Iran resembles the older Western types and uses six or more (always an even number) side-by-side squares successively (vertically) numbered. The player uses a peg or a flat stone that the player must kick to the next square as the player is hopping. If either the stone or a player's foot lands on a line, the player forfeits the game (or loses a turn). Although somewhat less common, the contemporary Western type is also played.

A French variant of hopscotch is known as escargot (snail) or marelle ronde (round hopscotch). It is played on a spiral course. Players must hop on one foot to the center of the spiral and back out again. A player marks one square with his or her initials, and from then on may place two feet in that square, while all other players must hop over it. The game ends when all squares are marked or no one can reach the center, and the winner is the player who "owns" the most squares.

In Germany, Austria, and Switzerland the game is called Himmel und Hölle (Heaven and Hell) although there are also some other names used, depending on the region. The square below 1 or the 1 itself are called Erde (Earth) while the second to last square is the Hölle (Hell) and the last one is Himmel (Heaven). The first player throws a small stone into the first square and then jumps to the square and must kick the stone to the next square and so on, however, the stone or the player cannot stop in Hell so they try to skip that square.

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