conker [M18th] Children originally played conkers not with horse chestnuts but with snail shells. The word conker is first recorded in the 1840s as a dialect word for a snail shell, and may have originally come from conch [ME], a kind of mollusc, which is probably also the origin of conk [E19th], meaning ‘the nose’. On the other hand, conker could be related to conquer (ME, from Latin conquirere ‘gain, win’), which was how conker was often spelled. Indeed, an alternative name for the game at one time was conquerors. Horse chestnuts seem to have replaced snail shells late in the 19th century.