toy

toy, article designed to be played with, chiefly for children. Archaeological research has revealed numerous playthings from prehistoric civilizations. Early Egyptian, Greek, and Roman dolls, tops, balls, rattles, hoops, and miniature representations of furniture, houses, and dishes have been preserved. Mechanical toys, often created for the amusement of adults, have been popular since the Middle Ages. Toys made by individual artisans were early distributed in Germany; they were at first sold chiefly by peddlers at fairs. The use of sheet-metal stamping in Nuremberg c.1850 introduced the first large-scale manufacturing methods. The manufacture of toys is an important industry in most countries. Although many new toys are created each year, some, especially dolls, balls, art materials, and blocks, retain their popularity year after year. Educators and psychologists, beginning with Friedrich Wilhelm August Froebel and Maria Montessori, have stressed the role of toys in the mental, emotional, social, and physical development of children.

Bibliography

See A. Fraser, A History of Toys (1966); G. White, Antique Toys and Their Background (1971).

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toy

Plaything for a child or infant. Toys survive from the remote past and from a great variety of cultures. They range from the simple to the complex, from a stick or piece of string that becomes a toy in a child's hands to complex mechanical and electronic devices. Perennial favorites include balls, jump ropes, dolls, drums, whistles, dice, jackstones, board games, marbles, play weapons, and costumes. In the modern era the toy industry has grown tremendously, especially with the advent of computer games.

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toy - A computer system; always used with qualifiers. 1. "nice toy": One that supports the speaker's hacking style adequately. 2. "just a toy": A machine that yields insufficient computrons for the speaker's preferred uses. This is not condemnatory, as is bitty box; toys can at least be fun. It is also strongly conditioned by one's expectations; Cray XMP users sometimes consider the Cray-1 a "toy", and certainly all RISC boxes and mainframes are toys by their standards. See also Get a real computer!.