Keep away
children's game
Keep Away, also called Monkey in the Middle, Piggy in the Middle, Pickle in a Dish, or Pickle in the Middle, or Monkey, is a children's game in which two or more players must pass a ball to one another, while another player (in the middle) attempts to intercept it. The game could be considered a reverse form of circle dodgeball, because instead of trying to hit people in the middle with the ball, players attempt to keep the ball away from them. The game is played worldwide.
Rules
Keep Away is played by drawing a circle, about 10 feet (3.0 m) in diameter, on the ground. One person stands in the center (and is called it, the monkey, the piggy, or the pickle) and the rest stand outside the circle. A player outside the circle must then throw the ball through the circle to another person outside the circle with the goal being to prevent the person who is it from getting to the ball. This continues until the person who is it catches the ball or otherwise gains possession due to a failed catch, deflection, etc. An intended recipient who fails to catch the ball replaces the person in the middle, unless they fail before the ball touches any part of their body. The ball may not be torn out of any of the players' hands. The monkey must not move from their spot until the other players start passing it to each other.
“Keep away” enters the record as children's game. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Keep, away and children's can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Keep away” 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.