bead

[Emma Neve]

Hi!
Which word would you use for these?
Would "beads" work? Or "glass beads"?
Thank you

PS: we call them "biglie" in Italian... they're used by children in a game.

Emma

 

[bibliolept]

Those would be "marbles."

 

[Emma Neve]

Thanks a lot Bibliolept!
Does "marble" work for British and American English as well?
(Am I being too picky?)

Emma

 

[Matching Mole]

Yes, they are called marbles in the US and the UK. Marbles are for use in the game of marbles.

 

[cuchuflete]

The marbles shown in the linked photograph are called "cat's eye marbles" in
AE. I don't know if BE uses the same term.

 

[panjandrum]

The marbles shown in the linked photograph are called "cat's eye marbles" in
AE. I don't know if BE uses the same term.

We do.

 

[nzfauna]

In New Zealand (NZ) [is that an accepted abbreviation in this forum?], we do (or did, at least when I was a kid) use the term "cats eye" to refer to a particular type of marble, but not the ones pictured above.

I'm sure marble names are highly regional (within each school, probably!). For us, cats eyes were opaque black with one thin "cat-pupil-like" line of colouration.

 

[emma42]

Yes, marbles. As I recall, there were a lot of regional variations in the names of various marbles. We just used to call those particular marbles "marbles", but the opaque white ones with little bits of colour we called "milkies".