Why is it called Tetris?

The name Tetris is a small pun that hides in plain sight. Once you know its two halves, you can never unsee the number four in the game.

Below you will find the short version first, then a fuller walkthrough with clear Tetris examples, a few closely related questions, and a link to try it yourself. Everything here is free to play right in your browser.

The short answer: The name Tetris blends two words. The first is tetra, the Greek prefix for four, because every piece is made of exactly four cells. The second is tennis, the favorite sport of inventor Alexey Pajitnov. He combined the two into Tetris, and the four-based name has fit the game perfectly ever since.

Tetra plus tennis

Pajitnov coined the title by joining tetra, the Greek root meaning four, with tennis, the sport he enjoyed playing. The result was a word that sounded catchy and carried a built-in nod to the game's core number. It is one of the more elegant naming stories in gaming.

The four-cell connection

The tetra half is not arbitrary: every piece in the game is a tetromino, a shape built from four squares. Four cells per piece, four rows in a full Tetris clear, and the number four echoes through the whole design. The name is essentially a label for that four-ness.

A name that stuck

The title traveled with the game as it spread out of Moscow and never changed, staying identical across dozens of languages and platforms. That consistency helped make Tetris one of the most recognizable words in games. You can read how its creator arrived at it in the inventor question.

See the four in action

People also ask

What is a tetromino?

A tetromino is a geometric shape made of four squares joined edge to edge. Counting rotations as the same shape, there are five free tetrominoes, but Tetris treats mirror images as different, giving the seven pieces you play with. The word comes from tetra, the Greek for four.

Who invented Tetris?

Tetris was invented by Alexey Pajitnov, a computer engineer at the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Moscow, in 1985. He built the first version on an Electronika 60, and teenage programmer Vadim Gerasimov ported it to the IBM PC, with Dmitry Pavlovsky also involved early on. Because it was made on state equipment, Pajitnov saw no royalties for years.

What are the Tetris pieces called?

The seven Tetris pieces are named after the letters of the alphabet they look like: I, O, T, S, Z, J and L. The I is the long bar, the O is the square, and the rest are bends and elbows. Modern guideline Tetris gives each piece a fixed color so you can recognize it instantly.