Ball

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For other uses, see Ball (disambiguation).

Balls are objects typically used in games. They are usually hollow and spherical but can be other shapes, such as ovoid (only in a few special cases) or solid (as in billiards). In most games using balls, the play of the game follows the state of the ball as it is hit, kicked or thrown by players. Balls can also be used for more simple activities, such as, Catch, Marbles and Juggling.

Although many types of balls are today made from rubber, this form was unknown outside the Americas until after the voyages of Columbus. The Spanish were the first to see bouncing rubber balls (albeit solid and not inflated) which were employed most notably in the Mesoamerican ballgame. Balls used in various sports in other parts of the world prior to Columbus were made from other materials such as animal bladders or skins, stuffed with various materials.

1 Ball games
2 Etymology
3 Images
4 See also

[edit] Ball games

football, soccer, rugby, tennis, basketball, croquet, tennis, lacrosse and baseball.

[edit] Etymology

The first known use of the word ball in English in the sense of a globular body that is played with was in 1205 in Laȝamon's Brut, or Chronicle of Britain in the phrase, "Summe heo driuen balles wide ȝeond Þa feldes." The word came from the Middle English bal (inflected as ball-e, -es in turn from Old Norse böllr (pronounced [bɔllr]; compare Old Swedish baller, and Swedish båll) from Proto-Germanic ballu-z, (whence probably Middle High German bal, ball-es, Middle Dutch bal), a cognate with Old High German ballo, pallo, Middle High German balle from Old Teutonic ballon (weak masculine), and Old High German ballâ, pallâ, Middle High German balle, Old Teutonic ballôn (weak feminine). No Old English representative of any of these is known. (The answering forms in Old English would have been beallu, -a, -e -- compare bealluc, ballock.) If ball- was native in Teutonic, it may have been a cognate with the Latin foll-is in sense of a "thing blown up or inflated." In the later Middle English spelling balle the word coincided graphically with the French balle "ball" and "bale", which has hence been erroneously assumed to be its source.