Pool

 

Have you got your fingers crossed that you'll win your office Super Bowl pool this Sunday? You may be thinking that this type of pool is the same as the one you swim in (after all, it's like a big container that stuff is put in), but in fact it's a totally different word.

The gambling pool possibly comes from the French word poule (chicken). One of its slang meanings was "plunder" -- images of soldiers carting off chickens after sacking a village spring to mind. 

This came to mean the collective stakes in a card game that the winner takes like the victor's spoils of war. Then all kinds of groupings came to be known as “pools”: for gambling, as in office pools, and not for gambling, as in car pools, although sometimes those might be a gamble, depending on the drivers involved! 

The other "pool" has designated a small body of water since Anglo-Saxon times.

Photo by Riley McCullough on Unsplash