What is a “meeple” in Italian board games?

In Italian board-gaming you place your meeple — the small wooden figure that stands in for “you” on the board. Italian borrows the English word whole: il meeple, i meeple. The reviewer flags it as gergo, jargon: “il proprio pedone che in gergo si chiama meeple.” It’s a neat example of how hobbies import vocabulary intact rather than translating it — pedone is the everyday Italian for “pawn,” meeple is the insider term.

The word itself is young: coined in 2000 by gamer Alison Hansel during a session of Carcassonne, blending “my” + “people.” It entered the Oxford English Dictionary in 2015 and travelled into Italian (and most languages) untranslated. Spotting gergo in a sentence is your cue that a specialist, in-group word is coming.