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Maw (card game)

Scottish and Irish card game

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionOct 11, 2025
Entity authoritySource title only
Source-derived summary

Maw, formerly also mawe, was a Scottish card game for two players, popularised by James I, which is ancestral to the Irish national game of Twenty-five as well as the Canadian game of Forty-fives. Maw appears to be the same as five cards, a game described by Charles Cotton in the 17th century. The game disappeared from the literature after the period of the English Commonwealth, only to emerge in Ireland in the 19th century in new forms for two or more players and known as five and ten, spoil five and forty-five. These new variants are still played today, the latter has evolved into the Canadian game of forty-fives.

Editorial summary

This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Maw (card game)” as scottish and Irish card game. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.

Editorial reviewA practical starting point whose main value is the path it opens into stronger specialist and primary sources. The current 110-word lead offers orientation but no explicit four-digit date, so chronology should not be assumed. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. The account is most persuasive where card, game and Scottish can be independently traced.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as scottish and Irish card game. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.

Evidence profile

Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Oct 11, 2025.

Critical limits

Overview language is designed for orientation and should not be treated as a substitute for the evidence cited beneath it. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

Best used for
  • Subject orientation
  • Search vocabulary
  • Locating named sources
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The closest primary source, responsible institution and strongest cited specialist reference.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Maw (card game)”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Maw (card game) primary sources, Maw (card game) archive and card research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

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  2. What terminology or title could unlock a more precise catalogue search?
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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Maw (card game)” 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.