Which sport is played at Wimbledon?

Tennis, and Wimbledon is the oldest tournament in the sport, first played in 1877 as a way for the All England Croquet Club to raise money to repair a broken pony roller. Twenty-two men entered, the crowd was a couple of hundred, and the club has never removed croquet from its name.

It is the only Grand Slam still played on grass, which used to be the default surface and is now a specialist's puzzle: the ball skids and stays low, points are short, and the courts change character over the fortnight as the grass wears through behind the baseline. The rye grass is cut to exactly eight millimetres.

The game itself is older and French. Real tennis was played indoors from the twelfth century, and the scoring - fifteen, thirty, forty - probably comes from a clock face, with forty a corruption of forty-five. Love for zero is usually explained as l'oeuf, the egg, for the shape of a nought, though the etymology is disputed and may simply be the English word, as in playing for love rather than for money.