tennis [LME] Around 1400 tennis was the name for what is now known as real tennis, played on an enclosed court, but since the 1870s it has referred to the outdoor game also called lawn tennis. The name probably comes from Old French tenez meaning ‘take!’—presumably the server’s call to an opponent. Anyone for tennis? is supposedly a typical entrance or exit line spoken by a young man in the kind of drawing-room comedy popular in the 1920s or 1930s, although no actual example has been traced—the closest is ‘Anybody on for a game of tennis?’, from Misalliance (1914) by George Bernard Shaw.