Skittles

Skittle is recorded in English from the 1630s as the name of a ninepin bowling game, probably of Scandinavian origin, compared with Danish and Norwegian skyttel meaning shuttle or child's toy, though the Oxford English Dictionary says there is no evidence of the connection. In chess, skittles means informal, casual games, and Wiktionary defines the chess sense as an informal form of chess played without a clock, while the Glossary of chess carries skittles and skittles room as headwords for casual play away from the tournament boards. Edward Winter's Earliest Occurrences of Chess Terms traces the usage to the mid-19th century: skittling appears in the Chess Player's Chronicle, 1846, page 2, in the sentence, This game is of the description known as skittling among proficients, and skittles is recorded in C. Tomlinson's The Chess Player's Annual for the Year 1856, page 61, an OED citation. The compound skittles room has a later trail: A Way with Words cites Chess Review of November 1951, pages 328-329, for a skittles game in Paris, and a 2007 Washington Post article by Wells Tower for the room itself.

First documented: 1846 — Chess Player's Chronicle, 1846, p. 2 (skittling), per Edward Winter; skittles in C. Tomlinson, The Chess Player's Annual for the Year 1856, p. 61