Dominoes are small, rectangular tiles that can be stacked on end to form long lines. They are a popular toy for children and can also be used as a tool for learning the alphabet or counting. If one domino in a line is tipped over, it will cause the next domino to tip, and so on. This is the basis of the term, “domino effect.” The phrase has also been applied to larger events in people’s lives that can have many ramifications.
A typical set of dominoes includes 28 tiles, each with an arrangement of dots, or pips, on one side and blank on the other. Players can shuffle the pieces before beginning to draw in order to ensure that neither player knows where any particular tile is located. The remaining shuffled tiles are called the stock or boneyard. In games for two, each player draws seven tiles from the stock and plays them until an opening double is found. The player who plays this first piece is awarded points equal to the number of pips on the opposing player’s tiles.
Some games, such as poker or blackjack, use dominoes to determine the winning hand. Other games use a different type of scoring system. In most of these, a player’s goal is to be the first person to reach a certain number of points within a given time limit. To do this, they must make matches with the other players’ dominoes to score a point.
The word, domino, is thought to come from a Latin verb meaning “fall over.” However, its etymology is less clear. The word was apparently in common usage in English and French by the mid-18th century, but it may have earlier denoted a garment worn together with a mask at a carnival or a masquerade.
Many of the games that involve dominoes are played by placing the tiles on a flat surface so they can be tipped over. This allows players to build complex patterns and, in some cases, create structures that can take days to finish falling over.
As a toy, dominoes provide hours of entertainment for children and adults alike. Each tile is positioned so that the matching ends of two adjacent dominoes touch. The resulting layout is then referred to as a domino pattern.
Some dominoes are arranged in a grid to make it easier to find the matches needed for a chain reaction. Other players prefer to place them in a square, requiring the matching ends to be on opposite sides of a square to connect.
Physicist Stephen Morris, who has studied the power of dominoes, believes that gravity is the key factor in creating a good domino setup. He explains that when a domino is standing upright, it has potential energy, which is the stored energy from its position. When the domino falls, most of this potential energy is converted to kinetic energy, which causes the rest of the dominoes to topple over.