A king's game first
Long before lawn tennis there was real tennis, played indoors on stone courts with lopsided walls, sloping roofs and hard, hand-sewn balls. It was a game for kings and nobles in France and England, and Henry the Eighth was a keen player; a court rebuilt on the site of his at Hampton Court Palace is still in use today. Our Tudors page covers the king himself.
The outdoor game most people know was patented in 1874 by an army officer, Major Walter Wingfield, who sold it in a boxed set under the Greek-sounding name Sphairistike. Nobody could say it, and it soon became simply lawn tennis. The first championship at Wimbledon was held in 1877.
Love, fifteen, thirty, forty
Tennis scoring is famously odd. A player with no points has LOVE, then fifteen, thirty and forty. One popular explanation says love comes from the French word for egg, because a zero looks like one; another says it means playing for love of the game rather than money. Neither has been proved. The jump from thirty to forty may once have been forty-five, shortened because it was quicker to say.
At forty-all the score is DEUCE, and a player must win two points in a row. A game is part of a set, and most matches are won by the best of three or five SETS. A TIEBREAK settles a set that reaches six games each.
A match that lasted three days
At Wimbledon in 2010, John Isner and Nicolas Mahut played a first-round MATCH that went on for eleven hours and five minutes over three days. At the time there was no tiebreak in the final set, and it finished 70–68 in the fifth. The scoreboard stopped working because it could not show numbers that high, and both players were given a special award.
Matches like that were one reason the big tournaments later brought in tiebreaks for the final set. The GRAND SLAM tournaments are the Australian Open, the French Open, Wimbledon and the US Open, and winning all four in one year is called a Grand Slam too.
Hawks, white clothes and the shots in the grid
WIMBLEDON has kept strict traditions. Players must wear almost entirely white, and a trained hawk flies over the courts in the early morning to scare away pigeons. Tens of thousands of balls are used over the fortnight, and they are kept cool so they bounce the same way every day. In 2025 Wimbledon replaced its line judges with electronic line calling, using cameras that track the ball, ending a tradition that had lasted almost 150 years.
The shots are the language of the game: the SERVE that starts each point, the ACE that the other player cannot touch, the FOREHAND and BACKHAND, the VOLLEY hit before the ball bounces, the SMASH, the high LOB and TOPSPIN that makes the ball dip. A RALLY moves between the BASELINE and the NET, and the UMPIRE watches over the COURT. In DOUBLES, four players share it, each with a RACKET.