Dominoes have long been a favorite childhood toy for kids and grown-ups. They are fun to play with and can create a beautiful display. Many people also enjoy arranging dominoes to form patterns or other artistic pieces. Some people even compete in domino-setting competitions.
A domino is a small, thumbsized, rectangular block bearing from one to six pips or dots. A set of 28 such pieces constitutes a full domino set. The term also refers to the game played with these blocks, in which players lay them down in lines or angular patterns and then flip them over, causing them to collapse in a chain reaction.
As the popularity of dominoes grew, so did the number of games that could be played with them. Many of these new games were based on skill and strategy, rather than chance. Others involved physical challenges, such as a domino toss or rolling of dice. Still others were entertainments such as domino art, in which large, complex chains of dominoes are arranged to form pictures or other structures.
Domino is a popular word in the English language, but its roots are obscure. It appears to be related to the French word dormir, which means “to sleep.” The word may have come from a combination of the French and Latin words or from an earlier sense of the word, which denoted a garment worn with a mask for a carnival or masquerade.
Lily Hevesh loved playing with her grandparents’ classic 28-piece domino set when she was 9 years old. She would set them up in straight or curved lines and flick the first one. Then she’d watch them all fall, one by one, down to the ground.
Now 24, Hevesh is a professional domino artist, creating stunning domino setups for movies, TV shows, and events—including the album launch of pop star Katy Perry. Her YouTube channel, Hevesh5, has more than 2 million subscribers. She’s worked on projects involving more than 300,000 dominoes and helped to set the Guinness World Record for most dominoes in a circular arrangement. Her largest installations take several nail-biting minutes to fall.
Hevesh says that there is one physical phenomenon that’s essential to a great domino setup: gravity. She explains that when you knock over a domino, it’s pulled down toward Earth by gravity, which gives it the potential energy to push on the next domino, and then the next, and so on.
Likewise, when writers write novels, each scene, action, and character is like a domino in the larger story. Each one impacts the next, and the impact can be significant if the writer isn’t careful. For this reason, writers should carefully consider the implications of each plot beat before deciding how it will impact the overall plot. To do so, they need to understand how dominoes work.