As balls are one of the most familiar spherical objects to humans, the word "ball" is used to refer to, or to describe, anything spherical or near-spherical.
Random silent slideshow of beach balls, foot balls, golf balls, cricket balls, tennis balls, etc
A ball is a round, usually spherical but sometimes ovoid, object with various uses. It is used in ball games, where the play of the game follows the state of the ball as it is hit, kicked or thrown by players
. In the context of sports, "ball" need not refer to a spherical object, as is the case in
American football.
Balls can also be used for simpler activities, such as catch, marbles and juggling. Balls made from hard-wearing materials are used in engineering applications to provide very low friction bearings, known as ball bearings. Black-powder weapons use stone and metal balls as projectiles.
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
Europeans 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.
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 La?amon's
Brut, or
Chronicle of Britain in the phrase, "Summe heo driuen balles wide ?eond Þa feldes." The word came from the
Middle English bal (inflected as ball-e, -es, in turn from Old Norse böllr (pronounced [b?l?r]; compare
Old Swedish baller, and
Swedish boll) 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 Proto-Germanic *ballon (weak masculine), and Old High German ballâ, pallâ, Middle High German balle, Proto-Germanic *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
Germanic, 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. French balle (but not boule) is assumed to be of Germanic origin, itself, however. In
Ancient Greek the word p???a (palla) for "ball" is attested besides the word "sfa??a", sphere.
A ball, as the essential feature in many forms of gameplay requiring physical exertion, must date from the very earliest times. A rolling object appeals not only to a human baby but to a kitten and a puppy. Some form of game with a ball is found portrayed on
Egyptian monuments, and is played among aboriginal tribes at the present day. In
Homer, Nausicaa was playing at ball with her maidens when
Odysseus first saw her in the land of the Phaeacians (Od. vi.
100). And Halios and Laodamas performed before Alcinous and Odysseus with ball play, accompanied with dancing (Od. viii. 370).
Randomness is the lack of pattern or predictability in events.[1] A random sequence of events, symbols or steps has no order and does not follow an intelligible pattern or combination. Individual random events are by definition unpredictable, but in many cases the frequency of different outcomes over a large number of events (or "trials") is predictable. For example, when throwing two dice, the outcome of any particular roll is unpredictable, but a sum of 7 will occur twice as often as 4. In this view, randomness is a measure of uncertainty of an outcome, rather than haphazardness, and applies to concepts of chance, probability, and information entropy.
- published: 08 Mar 2016
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