Why did they call it badminton?

It turns out badminton is named after a place: Badminton House, the estate where the game was first played in England. Badminton House is the private home of the Duke and Duchess of Beaufort and lies in the Gloucestershire countryside. There are a few different stories about how the game came to be played at the house. A book about great homes in England and the website for Badminton House claim that the game was opens in a new windowinvented by children in the house in 1863 and the Oxford English Dictionary has a story they call unsubstantiated that says the elastic shuttlecock was substituted for a ball so the children wouldn’t damage pictures opens in a new windowhung in the house. However, opens in a new windowthe website for the United States badminton team and opens in a new windowa BBC article about the sport note that versions of the game had been played for hundreds of years in Europe, India, and China, and that it was brought to Badminton House by British officers who had played the game in India, where they called it poona. (The Oxford English Dictionary also calls this origin story unsubstantiated. So who knows?)

Regardless of the origin though, the game remains named for the estate. According to the opens in a new windowOnline Etymology Dictionary, the name Badminton itself comes from an Old English word that means “the estate of (a man called) Baduhelm.” I tried to find out what Baduhelm means, and the furthest I could get was to find that opens in a new windowhelm (at least when it was a name by itself) usually meant “herdsman.”

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