How did the game of craps get its name? Why not a dice table, game of dice, etc., rather than the word craps. Did it possibly come from the fact that when you have a seven out, everyone says "Crap!"? Just wondering.
There are a couple of possible explanations.
The primary ancestor of the dice game we now call craps was hazard, which was brought to Europe by the Arabs in the eighth century and is a European pronunciation of the Arabic word az-zahr, meaning dice. The French referred to the two- and three-spots as “crabs.” This was, in one version of the etymology, corrupted into “craps.”
Hazard entered the United States through New Orleans in the early nineteenth century, where it was originally known as crapaud, the French word for "toad," which referred to the position of the players who crouched over the dice on a floor or a sidewalk. In the second version, crapaud was shortened to craps by English speakers when it began its transformation into the game that’s played today.
In our view, neither is particularly satisfying, but they're all we've got.
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That Don Guy
Apr-10-2018
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