Peg Out
Meaning
Die.
Origin
This phrase is widely thought to have been taken from the scoring in card games like cribbage, in which the score is kept on a pegboard.
The game ends when the first person ‘pegs out’. That view may be correct, but there doesn’t appear to be any conclusive evidence to support it.
That use of ‘peg out’ in card playing is first recorded in Hardy & Ware’s The Modern Hoyle, 1870:
“He may with a very poor hand be just able to ‘show’ or peg out.”
Cribbage is quite an old game and John Aubrey in his biographical work Brief Lives, said that Sir John Suckling, “invented the game of cribbidge”. This seems to be a reliable account and is supported by other contemporary evidence. It may be then that the term ‘peg out’ was used prior to 1870 but wasn’t recorded.
