Hi all. This is hic speaking, under a just-for-fun name. I've been reading the Harry Potter books, and plan to seed quite a few threads in here.

How come Quidditch is always capitalized? Other sports are not: we say baseball, cricket, soccer, polo, football, basketball, etc., in lower case. Rowling even uses 'soccer' and 'basketball', and she lower-cases them, but Quidditch is always capitalized. I haven't the least idea why.

Maybe because it is the only sport that the witch/wizard world has? We use lowercase because we have so many different sports like basketball, football, soccer, etc. They seem to only have Quidditch. (Though doesn't broom hockey seem a no-brainer for them??)

There's a long article about the game on Wikipedia.

It doesn't throw any light on the capitalisation issue directly, but it does say:

quote:

the game is named after Queerditch Marsh, where the earliest version of the game was played in the eleventh century

Since it was named after a place, that might be the reason for the capital letter.

So would it qualify as an eponym?

TrossL - they have other games, though. Exploding Snap, and Wizard's Chess, to name a few.

A word named after a place is a toponym. See tinman's list of -nym words in https://wordcraft.infopop.cc/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/9326...931031322#9931031322