Casino

The history of the word casino reveals a transformation from a cottage to a gambling palace. The source of our word, Italian casino, is a diminutive of casa, "house." Central to the transformation is the development of the senses of casino in Italian. The word was first applied to a country house and then came to be used for a social gathering place, a room or building where one could dance, listen to music, and gamble. This last pastime seems to have gained precedence over the others, at least as far as the development of the word is concerned, and casino took on the meaning "gambling establishment." These senses of the Italian word have all been borrowed into English, the sense "social gathering place" being recorded first in the 18th century, the sense "gambling establishment" first in 1851.

Building or room used for gambling. The term originally referred to a public hall for music and dancing, but by the late 19th century it had come to denote a gaming house, particularly one in which card and dice games were played. Today casinos are places where gamblers can risk their money against a common gambler (called the banker or house), and they have an almost uniform character throughout the world. One of the oldest and best-known casinos is that at Monte Carlo (Monaco), founded in 1861. Others include those at Cannes and Nice (France), Corfu (Greece), Baden-Baden (Germany), Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), and Las Vegas and Reno (Nevada, U.S.). Casinos in Havana (Cuba) were confiscated by the Castro government after the 1959 revolution, spelling the end of a flourishing gambling scene that rivaled Las Vegas. Nevada has long had casino gambling, but other U.S. states prohibited it; that ban was ended when a casino opened in Atlantic City, N.J., in 1978. From the 1980s casinos began appearing on American Indian reservations, which are not subject to state antigambling statutes, and casino gambling expanded vastly in the U.S. as gambling became legal in more states, particularly as a riverboat operation. In the late 1990s Internet gambling sites permitted players to play casino games such as roulette and blackjack. These virtual casinos usually offered the option of playing against other players or only against the house.