A question about the origin of the word quoit threw us for a loop. (来源：英语杂志 http://www.EnglishCN.com)

That's not because we couldn't find the linguistic ancestor of quoit—or, as it's sometimes pronounced, /koit/. That 15th century coinage is believed to originate in the Middle English word coit and may well share a still older ancestor with quilt.

No, our loop-throwing comes from the actual meaning of quoit: quoit names "a flattened ring of iron or circle of rope used in a throwing game." The game of quoits resembles that of horseshoes: the quoits are thrown from a mark toward a pin in an attempt to ring the pin or come as near to it as possible.

In addition to its fun and games sense, quoit has another meaning more akin to that of quilt . . . "a very, very heavy quilt." Quoit can name the stone cover of a cromlech or cist, or sometimes, the cromlech or cist itself. This sort of cist is a "Neolithic grave lined with stone slabs;" a cromlech is a "circle of monoliths usually enclosing a mound or dolmen." And dolmen names a "prehistoric monument found throughout Britain and France that consists of two or more upright stones supporting a horizontal stone slab and believed to be a tomb."