with one black ball and a white cue ball" on a table with pockets. The definition no longer even provides the obsolete meaning found in the print edition, and refers only to the typical game "using two sets of seven coloured and numbered balls. : 143&187Īlthough skittle pool is played on a pocketless carom billiards table, the term pool later stuck to all new games of pocket billiards as the sport gained in popularity in the United States, : 186 and so outside the cue sports industry, which has long favored the more formal term pocket billiards, the common name for the sport has remained pool. In the British Empire for most of the nineteenth through early twentieth century, pool referred specifically to the game of life pool. The OED defines it as generally "any of various types of billiards for two or more players" but goes on to note that the first specific meaning of "a game in which each player uses a cue ball of a distinctive colour to pocket the balls of the other player(s) in a certain order, the winner taking all the stakes submitted at the start of the contest" is now obsolete, and its other specific definitions are all for games that originate in the United States. The oldest use of the word "pool" to describe a billiards-like game was made in 1797 in a Virginia newspaper. Alternatively the term could derive from the verb to pool in the sense of combining objects or stakes. Supposedly, participants would put an equal amount of money into a pot and throw stones at a live chicken, and the person who successfully hit the chicken first would win the pooled money. The Oxford English Dictionary speculates that "pool" and other games with collective stakes is derived from the French poule (literally translated "hen"), in which the poule is the collected prize, originating from jeu de la poule, a game that is thought to have been played during the Middle Ages. Historic print depicting Michael Phelan's billiard saloon in New York City, January 1, 1859.
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