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I've looked this up on several sites, including Wiktionary.com, Dictionary.com, and etymonline.com, but the results in all three are the same: no results.

I was just wondering, where did this term come from? Who coined it? When did it come into use? Does anyone have information regarding this word?

Edit: The only context would be in gaming, where the hitpoints of a character are shown.

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2 Answers 2

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Hit Points as a way of referencing the general remaining health of a person is taken from the game Dungeons and Dragons, originally published back in the '70s. It was the first really popular stat-based role-playing game, and became kind of a touchstone for geekyness.

The idea was that you had a given number of hit points, based on your character class, constitution, and level. When attacked, you lose a certain number based on the power of the attack and a die roll. When/if your "HP" drops to 0, you die.

There are other games that use a "hit point" system these days, and probably were before D&D, but that is the game that popularized the concept. If you hear someone talking about "hit points" in real life, they are making a nerdy D&D reference.

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    Clearly D&D was the beginning of "HP's" popularity, if not the origin of the idea, but I'm not willing to search through the rules for the plethora of wargames put out by Avalon Hill years ago for the pre D&D era geeks. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avalon_Hill
    – Spare Oom
    Aug 1, 2011 at 21:48
  • Can you please provide a definite link that clearly states that "hit point" actually was invented by D&D?
    – Thursagen
    Aug 1, 2011 at 23:38
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    Thursagen - I can't because it wasn't. As I said in the answer, D&D didn't invent the concept, so much as popularize it. IMHO that is the more important activity, and thus D&D deserves the lion's share of the credit. Nobody is thinking "that wargame called Ironclads" when hearing a snarky reference to hitpoints.
    – T.E.D.
    Aug 2, 2011 at 16:24
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The terms defense strength points and attack strength points, which were used in old board games or war games, could have eventually been shortened to hit points and then used in other categories, such as role playing games like D&D. Alternatively, the term may have been coined at the time of D&D and then began to be used for the older games for short.

From BoardGameGeek.com:

Naval wargames are notorious for the many-hit-points feature. One of the cool things about tactical naval games is that a ship can take (or inflict) so many different kinds of damage.

Whether the term in reference to games is old as Battleship, can't be determined merely from the quote above, unfortunately.

I don't know if it is significant that the NGram shows the use of the phrase went up shortly after D&D's invention in 1974.

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  • You might be interested in the short history here: <en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_(gaming)#History>
    – simchona
    Aug 1, 2011 at 0:56
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    According to this interview with Dave Arneson (co-creator of D&D), he used "hit points" based on a game he'd developed earlier called Ironclads. The addition of "hit points" and "armor class" appear to be innovations to role playing introduced by D&D (Ironclads seems to be unpublished?).
    – Kit Z. Fox ♦
    Aug 1, 2011 at 0:56
  • Would have voted this up, rather than make my own answer, but popular "HP" references are all references back to D&D (or more modern games modeled after it). I realize Gygax didn't invent the concept from whole cloth, but he's the parent source for everyone else.
    – T.E.D.
    Aug 1, 2011 at 12:28
  • @Kit, boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/2800/ironclads was published in 1979. Wargames were popular in geek circles even before D&D.
    – Spare Oom
    Aug 1, 2011 at 21:54
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    @T.E.D. Gygax didn't invent the concept, Arneson did. If you read the interview, he came up with it so that the individual battles would last longer. It was an innovation to the classic matrix-style wargames that were popular prior to that. At least, that it how it seems to me, but I may be misinterpreting it.
    – Kit Z. Fox ♦
    Aug 2, 2011 at 0:30

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