I was there when +Alison Hansel coined the word "meeple" and now it's in the OED!
I could be misremembering some details, but I think I've reconstructed it right:
I went to the Essen game fair in October 2000 and one of the many games I brought back was Carcassonne. I had met Alison through a local board gaming mailing list (UG). We were at a mutual friend's house in Wakefield for gaming on November 10, 2000 and I had brought many of the new games we brought back, including Carcassonne. Alison saw the Carcassonne pawns and immediately called them "meeples" a contraction of "my people" and I thought maybe she said it was partially reminiscent of the German word Pöppel for game pawn. (Alison had recently lived in Germany). It's possible the first actual usage was at another game event around this time, but that's when I first heard it.
At the time, the community of people playing "German-style board games" (that's what we called them then) in Boston was growing fast as well as on the Internet (BoardGameGeek had launched earlier that year). Alison played a lot of games with a lot of different gaming groups at the time. As such, the term quickly became standard among gamers in Boston, and it quickly spread to the Internet. The first mention on the UG mailing list was early December, 2000, remarking that other people on the Internet were picking up the new word. Within six months or maybe a year it was the standard word more or less everyone on BGG, Spielfrieks, r.g.b and UG were using.
I could be misremembering some details, but I think I've reconstructed it right:
I went to the Essen game fair in October 2000 and one of the many games I brought back was Carcassonne. I had met Alison through a local board gaming mailing list (UG). We were at a mutual friend's house in Wakefield for gaming on November 10, 2000 and I had brought many of the new games we brought back, including Carcassonne. Alison saw the Carcassonne pawns and immediately called them "meeples" a contraction of "my people" and I thought maybe she said it was partially reminiscent of the German word Pöppel for game pawn. (Alison had recently lived in Germany). It's possible the first actual usage was at another game event around this time, but that's when I first heard it.
At the time, the community of people playing "German-style board games" (that's what we called them then) in Boston was growing fast as well as on the Internet (BoardGameGeek had launched earlier that year). Alison played a lot of games with a lot of different gaming groups at the time. As such, the term quickly became standard among gamers in Boston, and it quickly spread to the Internet. The first mention on the UG mailing list was early December, 2000, remarking that other people on the Internet were picking up the new word. Within six months or maybe a year it was the standard word more or less everyone on BGG, Spielfrieks, r.g.b and UG were using.
From mic drops to manspreading: an Oxford Dictionaries update | OxfordWords blog
Colin McMillen - 2015-08-28 00:05:27-0400
This requires a story :)
Matthew Gray - 2015-08-28 01:06:26-0400
+Colin McMillen, good point. Edited the original post with my recollection of the story.
Colin McMillen - 2015-08-28 07:14:50-0400
Awesome :) I certainly remember "meeple" (also in conjunction with Carcassonne) having spread to my friends in Minneapolis by 2002-2003 or so.