IT’S one of the most popular board games that most families are the proud owners of and play year in, year out.
But do you know how Monopoly – which traces back to the 1900s and has reportedly sold over 275 million copies worldwide – got its famous name?

People are only just discovering for the first time that the game’s title has a very important meaning.
That’s because the board game and tactics – which features 2-8 players buying and trading property until they occupy most of the board – has a direct link to its name.
In a Buzzfeed article about “obvious things people only just realised”, someone admitted they’d had the epiphany while playing with friends.

They wrote: "I was playing Monopoly, and someone owned a load of properties all clustered together.
“I said, ‘You’ve got a bit of a monopoly on that part of the board...’
“...Hey that’s funny, because we’re playing Monopoly, and you got a...Oh, I see now!’”
But the player wasn’t the only one to have suddenly had the realisation.
In a TikTok video posted by @timthetatman, he was busy discussing how the owners of Volkswagen also owned other big hitter car companies like Bentley.
Then one of his followers pointed out that “it’s called a monopoly” – leading to the penny dropping.
Tim asked: “Bro, is that why the board game Monopoly is called Monopoly?
“A light bulb just went off – because you own… Wow. So Volkswagen is like the Monopoly board.
“Wow, it all just clicked. It’s crazy…”

Meanwhile, another person took to a message board to ask if others knew about where the name Monopoly had come from.
They asked other fans of the game: “Is monopoly (the concept) named after monopoly (the game?
“Or is monopoly (the game) named after monopoly (the concept)?”
As people debated back and forth, someone waded into the debate and gave their take.
They revealed: “The word originates in Ancient Greek roots for ‘sole’ and ‘I barter, sell.’
“A monopoly is therefore a market with only a single seller of some particular good/service (one where only one entity is buying is instead called a monopsony.
“The game borrowed the term.
“It was, in its initial form, designed to critique capitalism and illustrate how monopolies tend to concentrate all wealth into few hands.
“It got sanitised a bit along the way.”
Further clearing up the confusion, Monopoly’s Wikipedia page states: “The game is named after the economic concept of a monopoly.
“[This means] the domination of a market by a single entity.”
