Coin flipping
practice of throwing a coin in the air to choose between two alternatives
Coin flipping, coin tossing, or heads or tails involves launching a coin in the air and then checking which side is showing once it has landed, in order to randomly choose between two alternatives. It is a form of sortition which inherently has two possible outcomes. Used in such a fashion, the coin serves as a binary lot.
History and nomenclature
Coin flipping was known to the Romans as navia aut caput ("ship or head"), as some coins had a ship on one side and the head of the emperor on the other.
In England, this was referred to as cross and pile, "pile" denoted the reverse side, a usage dating back to Medieval times. In France the term is inverted: pile ou face. Dutch has kop of munt (head or coin), Spanish cara o cruz (face or cross), German Kopf oder Zahl (head or number), Portuguese cara ou coroa (face or crown), Polish rzut monetą (coin toss), or (less commonly) orzeł czy reszka (eagle or remainder, i.e.change), and in Czech simply hod mincí (toss of a coin).
Process
During a coin toss, the coin is thrown into the air such that it rotates edge-over-edge an unpredictable number of times. Either beforehand or when the coin is in the air, an interested party declares "heads" or "tails", indicating which side of the coin that party is choosing. The other party is assigned the opposite side.
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This entry incorporates text from “Coin flipping” 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.