Its establishment as the modern sport can be dated to two separate inventions.
Between 1859 and 1865, in Birmingham, England, Major Harry Gem, a solicitor, and his friend Augurio Perera, a Spanish merchant, combined elements of the game of rackets and the Spanish ball game Pelota and played it on a croquet lawn in Edgbaston. In 1872, both men moved to Leamington Spa and in 1874, with two doctors from the Warneford Hospital, founded the world's first tennis club. The Courier of 23 July 1884 recorded one of the first tennis tournaments, held in the grounds of Shrubland Hall.
In December 1873, Major Walter Clopton Wingfield devised a similar game for the amusement of his guests at a garden party on his estate of Nantclwyd in Llanelidan, Wales. He based the game on the older Real tennis. At the suggestion of Arthur Balfour, Wingfield named it "lawn tennis," and patented the game in 1874 with an eight-page rule book titled "Sphairistike or Lawn Tennis", but he failed to succeed in enforcing his patent.
Wingfield borrowed both the name and much of the French vocabulary of real tennis:
- Tennis comes from the French tenez, the imperative form of the verb tenir, to hold: This was a cry used by the player serving in royal tennis, meaning "I am about to serve!" (rather like the cry "Fore!" in golf).
- Racquet comes from raquette, which derives from the Arabic rakhat, meaning the palm of the hand.
- Deuce comes from à deux le jeu, meaning "to both is the game" (that is, the two players have equal scores).
- Love is widely believed to come from "l'oeuf", the French word for "egg", representing the shape of a zero.
- The convention of numbering scores "15", "30" and "40" comes from quinze, trente and quarante, which to French ears makes a euphonious sequence, or from the quarters of a clock (15, 30, 45) with 45 simplified to 40.
