I came across this word in a crossword puzzle (last one I had to get!) and now understand (only) that it is a card game. Etymonline told me it was first recorded in the 19C but no origins of the name are known, except that it seems to come from the French ‘bézigue’.

Fair enough.

But living in Holland it reminded me of a Dutch adjective ‘bezig’, which comes from the same root as ‘busy’ in English.

Going further, ‘bezigheid’ is a noun meaning literally ‘busyness’, or hobby, pasttime, occupation.

Now going beyond the limits of reason, I speculated that the French might have borrowed the word during the Napoleonic war times to use for some card game either already existent under another word, or to describe some Dutch card game of the same era.

Can anyone add anything to the origins?

(I can tell myself that the ‘bezig’ theory is a load of ungrounded cock and bull, probably - but would be nice!)

Thanks in advance.

AHD says the French word may be from Italian bazzica, a kind of card game.  (It certainly has nothing to do with Dutch bezig.)

Like the AHD, a French etymology just says

(1)BÉSIGUE n. m. XIXe siècle. Origine inconnue.
Jeu, voisin du mariage, où l’on emploie autant de fois trente-deux cartes qu’il y a de joueurs. Jouer au bésigue.

So even in French the word emerges in the 19th century and the origin is unknown. As I don’t speak or read French well, I’m not sure what is meant by “voisin du mariage” (neighbor of the wedding? marriage?). I think it has to do with the Jack of diamonds and the Queen of spades appearing together in one hand.

"Mariage” in this case is another card game, closely related.  King and Queen of the same suit in a hand is somwhere in the game-play.
But no help on the origins of bezigue

in this case, voisin du mariage simply means that it’s similar to another card game called mariage. There’s a whole family of such games, mostly played with a reduced pack - some, like Bézique, with a reduced double pack: sixty-six, klaberjass, and so on (I believe pinochle, a game I’ve never played, belongs to the same family).

My father taught me to play bézique when I was a boy. He told me that he and my mother used to play, when they were courting. We had special score cards, each like an analog utility meter, with several little dials for tens, hundreds, thousands, etc. Each dial had a little brass pointer, which you moved round by hand. We used to score continuously for months on end, never finishing, so neither of us ever won or lost. Bézique, besides being the name of the game, is also the name of what Wikipedia charmingly calls “the peculiar liaison” of Jack of Diamonds, and Queen of Spades (that delightful “peculiar liaison” Harold and Maude came to mind, suddenly). This scored 40 points. Double Bézique scored 500.

Wikipedia suggests an Italian origin for the name Bézique. Morehead and Mott-Smith (Hoyle’s Rules of Games. 2nd. ed., -Penguin, 1983) say nothing. BlackGrey’s stab at a Dutch origin is valiant but ...far-fetched, perhaps?

Pipped by Steve, I see.

All, thanks for the contributions.

Lionello, I hit the jackpot with you!

Thanks very much for explaining the game. It sounds familiar as I know other games (esp. here in Holland) that are similar. After reading your description, I googled onwards and even stumbled on ‘klaberjass’ in English for a Dutch game I did not think I would ever find in English at all (klaverjassen in Dutch).

And LH, following up on the possible Italian derivation, I checked out an Italian etymological dictionary online. It mentioned bazza as the root of the word. There are two words under the lemma, and a quick summary of the likely candidate’s entry is:

‘By good fortune’. Probably introduced by German soldiers (mercenaries?) - from bazze (wage, earnings). From a German root Baz (better, best ). Anyway, the same word came to be the name of a card game where a lot of the luck centres on drawing the right card at the right time (so giving the meanings of stroke of luck, valuable thing gained inexpensively).

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BTW for anyone remotely interested, this topic was powered by the Guardian Cryptic crossword of last Sunday, where the following clue appeared (more or less as below, but don’t hold me to it):

“Queen gets around new quiz game (7)”