Lego Nomenclature
By:
April 28, 2010
The above chart detail is from a recent-ish story in The Morning News (via Everything is Miscellaneous) by Giles Turnbull, who points out that every family has its own nomenclature for individual pieces of Lego. Excerpt:
So that’s how we discovered that a “cylinder one-er” can also be known as “Coke bottles” or a “golden wiper.” Or that an “upper” is also a “bow” or a “cannon,” or a “four-studded upward slope.”
So true! My sons and I have done the same thing, over time — agreed to call a certain type of piece a “flat two-er,” and so forth. At one point, not long ago, I gave a fanciful name to each of the shapes in the game Blokus — i.e., the piece being held in the image below is a “McGillicuddy” — and insisted on discussing the game, while we played it, using these terms.
The experiment was not an unalloyed success.