Coconut shy

A coconut shy is a traditional British stall game most often found at funfairs, fetes and other outdoor fairground events, in which players pay for a set number of wooden balls, typically three, and throw them at coconuts balanced on top of raised posts, trying to knock a coconut off its stand to win it as a prize. The game's precise origin is uncertain, but it is generally thought to have developed from an earlier target game called Aunt Sally, with the earliest known photograph of a coconut shy dating from 1890 and the first literary references appearing from 1897 onward, and the term itself entering the Oxford English Dictionary in 1903. Coconuts were an exotic and relatively costly commodity in Britain during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which added to the appeal of winning one outright at a fairground stall, and the game became a fixture of British village fetes and traveling fairs during that period and has remained one since. Comparable throwing games exist in other countries under different names and with different targets, including Dosenwerfen in Germany, Chamboule-Tout in France and can-throwing games common at North American carnivals that typically use stacked milk cans rather than coconuts.