Other forms: dominoes, dominos
A domino is a flat tile with two halves, each marked with dots. Play dominoes, a set of dominoes, the domino fell.
A standard set runs from double blank to double six, twenty-eight tiles in all. The domino effect names one thing knocking over the next in a chain, and the domino theory was the Cold War argument that countries would fall to communism in the same way. Note that the word first named a hooded cloak.
1noundominoA flat tile with two halves marked with dots.
“He knocked over the first domino, and the whole line fell.”
domino is a game piece.
French domino first named a hooded garment, from Latin dominus, a lord. The tiles were named from the black and white of the hood.
Proto-Indo-European
*dem-
Medieval Latin
domino
French
domino
English, today
domino
Built from
1801, French domino (1771), originally the term for a hooded garment, itself from Medieval Latin domino, oblique case of dominus (“lord, master”); compare Medieval Latin dominicale (“a kind of veil”). by surface analysis, di- + -omino.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA