ball [ME] The spherical ball dates from the early Middle Ages, and comes from an old Scandinavian word that was also the ultimate root of Italian ballotta, from which English took ballot in the mid 16th century, originally the little ball used to register your vote, and of French ballon and Italian ballone ‘large ball’, one of which was the source of *balloon. The ball [L16th] at which people dance is unrelated. It came, in the early 17th century, from French, and goes back to Latin ballare ‘to dance’. This was also the source of ballad [LME] and ballet [E17th]. This dancing sense has notably given us have a ball [L19th], originally American. Testicles have been balls since the 13th century, but the slang sense ‘nonsense’ is Victorian. The meaning ‘courage, determination’ is more recent still, dating only from the early 20th century. People often claim that the phrase cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey comes from a former naval custom of storing cannonballs on a brass rack or ‘monkey’. When the weather was very cold the rack could contract and eject the cannonballs. There are some severe problems with this explanation, though. First, cannonballs were stored on a wooden rack, not a brass one. Second, it would have to be extremely cold to cause sufficient contraction in the metal for this to happen. And third, the earliest recorded versions of the phrase (dating from the mid 19th century) feature noses and tails rather than balls, which appear only in the mid 20th century, suggesting that the reference is to a brass statue of a monkey, and that the ‘balls’ are testicles rather than cannonballs. See also bollocks, cob, evil.