Croquet
sport that involves hitting plastic or wooden balls

Croquet (UK: or US: ) is a sport which involves hitting wooden, plastic, or composite balls with a mallet through hoops (often called "wickets" in the United States) embedded in a grass playing court.
The sport was codified in England in the 1860s and then spread overseas. However, similar games have been recorded back to the late Middle Ages. Today, there are several variations of the game.
At its highest level, the game is played internationally with top players coming from Australia, Egypt, England, South Africa, Spain, and the United States among other countries.
The sport can be played equally well by men and women. In 2018, two international championships open to both sexes were won by women.
Variations
In all forms of croquet, individual players or teams take turns striking the balls, scoring points by knocking them through a hoop. The game ends when a player or team reaches a predetermined number of points. Several variations exist that differ in when and how a stroke may be legally played, when points are scored, the layout of the lawn, and the target score.
“Croquet” enters the record as sport that involves hitting plastic or wooden balls. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Croquet, sport and involves can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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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 Jul 30, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q193387. The Library of Congress control number is sh85034259. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2018.
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This entry incorporates text from “Croquet” 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.