what is a conker

A conker is the seed of the horse chestnut tree, which is a hard brown nut found inside a green spiky case that falls to the ground in autumn. The name "conker" is also applied to the tree itself and to the game played with the seeds. The game of conkers is a traditional childrens game in Great Britain and Ireland, where two players take turns hitting each others conker using their own. One player lets the conker dangle on the full length of the string while the other player swings their conker and hits. A conker gains one point for surviving a hit that causes the other one to break. The point is scored whether the surviving conker was attacking or defending at the time. The game continues until one conker is left unbroken, and that conker is declared the winner. It is unclear how the game came to be called conkers, but it may have come from a local dialect word for "hard nut" or from the French "conque" (conch shell) when the game was originally played with seashells. Conkers are unfit for human consumption, but are eaten by cattle, deer, and horses. In the past, they were ground up and given to horses as cough medicine and to give them a shiny coat.