Craps
dice game
Craps is a dice game in which players bet on the outcomes of the roll of a pair of dice. Players can wager money against each other (playing "street craps") or against a bank ("casino craps"). Because it requires little equipment, "street craps" can be played in informal settings. While shooting craps, players may use slang terminology to place bets and actions.
History
Craps developed in the United States from a simplification of the western European game of Hazard, also spelled Hazzard or Hasard. The origins of Hazard are obscure and may date to the Crusades; a detailed description of Hazard was provided by Edmond Hoyle in Hoyle's Games, Improved (1790). At approximately the same time (1788), "Krabs" was documented as a French variation on Hazard.
In aristocratic London, crabs was the epithet for the sum combinations of two and three for two rolled dice, which in Hazard are instant-losing numbers for the first dice roll, regardless of the shooter's selected main number. The name craps is derived from the corruption of this term crabs (or Krabs) to creps and then craps.
According to some accounts, Hazard was brought from London to New Orleans in approximately 1805 by the returning Bernard Xavier Philippe de Marigny de Mandeville, the young gambler and scion of a family of wealthy landowners in colonial Louisiana.
The public source identifies “Craps” as dice game. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Craps, dice and game.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 30, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q869499. The Library of Congress control number is sh85033767. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1790, 1788 and 1805.
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This entry incorporates text from “Craps” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.