The title of the youngsters’s sport “tag” originated because the acronym of “contact and go.”
In August 2024, a well-recognized declare in regards to the origin of “tag” because the title of a extremely popular kids’s chasing sport was repeated in an X submit:
This origin story has loved such web reputation over time that it prompted us to go on an etymological expedition to evaluate its accuracy. We discovered it was not solely baseless, however contradicts what students really know in regards to the historical past of the phrase.
It is exhausting to think about an easier, extra generic sport than tag, the youngsters’s pastime through which one participant, designated as “it,” chases different gamers and tries to the touch (“tag”) considered one of them to make considered one of them “it,” and so forth advert infinitum.
In truth, with its many variations (together with freeze tag, final tag, blind man’s bluff, and “duck, duck, goose”), tag might be one of many oldest, most ubiquitous kids’s video games in existence (a variant is even talked about in ancient Greek poetry written 500 years earlier than the delivery of Christ).
We discovered it curious, then, when web memes started turning up in mid-2018 (and ever since) selling the assertion that the secret, “tag,” originated because the acronym of the English-language phrase “contact and go.”
It was couched, as trivia choices so usually are, within the type of a tidbit of information so intuitively apparent that one must be embarrassed to have by no means heard of it:
(@JennODonnell / X)
Thankfully, this was not our first go-round with folk etymology. Some years in the past, Snopes was requested to look into the declare that the phrase “information” is an acronym derived from any variety of strung-together phrases, the 2 hottest being “north, east, west, and south,” and “notable occasions, climate, and sports activities.”
By what etymologists really needed to say in regards to the derivation of the phrase, we realized that neither clarification of the origin of the phrase “news” is genuine. In reality, “information” originated as a French phrase, “nouvelles,” which in flip began out because the Latin phrase “nova.”
The imaginative fake histories deployed to help such claims normally evaporate below scrutiny. There are such a lot of examples of this phenomenon that somebody coined a intelligent nickname for it: “backronym,” outlined by the Oxford Dictionaries weblog as “an acronym intentionally created to swimsuit a specific phrase or phrases, both to create a memorable title, or as a fantastic clarification of a phrase’s origin.”
Thus, we weren’t stunned to search out that not a single dictionary we checked traced the origin of the phrase “tag,” as used to indicate the youngsters’s sport, to an acronym. Noting that its first recorded use in that actual sense occurred in 1738, Merriam-Webster says the origin of “tag” is unknown. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) says the phrase originated within the mid-18th century and is “maybe a variant of tig.” As to the origin of “tig,” OED tells us it got here into widespread use within the early 18th century and is “maybe a variant of the verb tick.”
As speculative as these etymological connections are, with the phrase “tick” we discover ourselves on what at the least feels like strong floor. That is OED once more:
Origin
Center English (as a verb within the sense ‘pat, contact’): most likely of Germanic origin and associated to Dutch tik (noun), tikken (verb) ‘pat, contact’. The noun was recorded in late Center English as ‘a light-weight faucet’; present senses date from the late seventeenth century.
Because it seems, “tick,” “tig,” “tag,” and “contact” are all names which were given to the youngsters’s sport in English down via the centuries. Writing for the British Library, folklorist and social historian Steve Roud had this to say about “chasing video games” and their names:
It’s inconceivable to confirm, nevertheless it’s a fairly secure guess that kids the world over have all the time chased one another for enjoyable, and that in most societies they’ve turned this into the best of all chasing video games which we name — relying the place you come from — ‘tig’, ‘tag’, ‘tick’, ‘it’, ‘he’, or ‘contact’. One baby chases the others attempting to the touch them; whoever s/he touches turns into, briefly, ‘it’ and is now the chaser till s/he touches one other. The sport, and the title ‘Tick’, return at the least to the early seventeenth century, once they first enter the written file in Britain.
“The Trendy Playmate, a Ebook of Video games, Sports activities and Diversions,” revealed in England in 1875, refers completely to this pastime as “tig“:
Tig.
That is the best of all video games. Out of numerous gamers one goes “Tig,” and tries to catch and contact any of the others indifferently; the participant so touched turns into tig in his trun till he touches some one else. The participant touched can’t contact again till he has first chased one other participant.
And although it is not conclusive, current proof does recommend that the sport many of the English-speaking world now is aware of as “tag” was higher recognized in earlier occasions by variants of a phrase equivalent to “tig” (and nonetheless is, in some areas), which contradicts the assertion that the title originated as an acronym of “contact and go.” In any case, no respected sources cite the acronym as its origin.
All that having been mentioned, we do discover revealed situations going again at the least 100 years whereby tag is at the least related with the phrase “contact and go.” Right here, for instance, is a poem published in 1912 that makes reference to “a taking part in tag, Contact and go”:
In the identical vein, a sprightly piece of piano music known as “A Game of Tag,” revealed in 1902, consists of the explanatory word: “Contact and go. Good for every kind of working video games.”
But neither of those sources asserts that tag stands for “contact and go.” What the examples point out is that the phrase “contact and go” has been used as an outline of the exercise known as “tag,” not that it was the acronymic supply of the title.
For the ultimate phrase on the topic, we refer you to this tweet from the editors of the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, who’re higher positioned than many of the remainder of us to know:
