Stone skipping
game of skill
Stone skipping and stone skimming are the arts of throwing a flat stone across water in such a way (usually sidearm) that it bounces off the surface. "Skipping" counts the number of bounces; "skimming" measures the distance traveled.
History
The 2nd-century CE Greek scholar Julius Pollux included an entry for stone skipping in his dictionary Onomasticon. The 3rd-century CE Latin writer Marcus Minucius Felix described children skipping shells on the beach. In England, a 1583 text calls it "Ducks and Drakes". An early explanation of the physics of stone-skipping was provided by Lazzaro Spallanzani in the 18th century.
Records
The world record for the number of skips, according to the Guinness Book of Records, is 88, by Kurt "Mountain Man" Steiner. The cast was achieved on September 6, 2013, at Red Bridge in the Allegheny National Forest, Pennsylvania. The previous record was 65 skips, by Max Steiner (no relation), set at Riverfront Park, Franklin, Pennsylvania. Before him, the record was 51 skips, set by Russell Byars on July 19, 2007, skipping at the same location.
“Stone skipping” enters the record as game of skill. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Stone, skipping and game can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 29, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1061307. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1583, 2013 and 2007.
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This entry incorporates text from “Stone skipping” 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.