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cornhole

The following article appeared in the online news site the Baltimore Banner on 23 March 2026:

Putting aside the fact that this headline is a wonderful example of the infinite expressiveness of language—expressing a thought that no one would ever have imagined prior to reading it—its use of cornhole is remarkable, for that word is an apparent violator of Gresham’s Law as applied to language—that “bad” meanings will drive out “good” ones. For cornhole is both a noun referring to a wholesome beanbag game, played by children and serious adult competitors alike, and a verb meaning to engage in anal intercourse.

Cornhole is not a case where the sexual sense of the word is restricted to a niche discourse community, so that those who participate in the beanbag game are unaware of its carnal meaning. The sexual sense is much older than the ludic sense and is well known to the wider public. In my own case, I was familiar with the sexual sense long before I learned of the game, which was when I first moved to Texas in 2016, and one of my students proudly admitted, to my confusion and surprise, that they enjoyed cornhole.

The game has recently made an appearance on the HBO series DTF St. Louis, where the protagonists get to know one another over a game of cornhole in the first episode; the episode is even titled “Cornhole.” But despite the sexual theme and plot of the series, in the show the game is simply a game. No one makes a crack about the sexual meaning of cornhole and there are no obvious double entendres involving it. While the writers must have been aware of the double meaning, there is no indication that is the case from watching the show. Cornhole is just about the most innocent aspect of the series.

As the setting for DTF St. Louis indicates, the game of cornhole is especially popular in middle America, apparently less so on the coasts. For those unfamiliar, it is played with a raised and tilted board that has a hole cut in it, and players attempt to toss beanbags into the hole. There is an American Cornhole Association, founded in 2005, that claims to be the “governing body for the sport of cornhole,” but its website seems to exist mainly to sell cornhole-related products. The rival American Cornhole League was founded in 2015; its website, while it also sells merchandise as a side hustle, focuses on organizing and promoting tournaments. And there is even a World Cornhole Organization that has held a Cornhole World Cup competition since 2023.

The game is first described in an 1883 patent under the name Parlor Quoits, the name cornhole being much more recent. That later name is only reliably attested to in the twenty-first century, although it may be a few decades older. I found the following classified ad in the Cleveland, Ohio Plain Dealer from 4 March 1979:

ANYONE KNOWING WHEREABOUTS of Mary Oriti of Parma, cabinet cornhole expert, please call Chuck at [phone number].

Putting aside the mystery of what happened to Mary, I can’t tell whether or not cabinet cornhole is a reference to the game. I’m reasonably confident that it doesn’t refer to the sex act, although it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that Chuck and Mary were into non-vanilla sex.

The earliest clear reference to the game of cornhole is in another Ohio classified ad, this one from 13 July 2001 in the Cincinnati Post:

CORNHOLE—Beanbag style yard game fun/safe for all $50 [phone number].

The Oxford English Dictionary has a first usage citation from 2002, so it’s a good assumption that the name of the game was becoming well established during the opening years of this century.

The sexual sense, on the other hand, dates to over a century ago. The gay slang verb to cornhole is recorded in academic literature in Edward Kempf’s 1920 Psychopathology:

He said the “boys call me chicken and kid me about cornholing me (sodomy) and they call me shitpot.” He was very suspicious of everyone and reluctant to tell me about his case. He was having auditory hallucinations and other vivid sensory disturbances. When asked, using his phrase, if he had been “cornholed,” he said not unless they had “chloroformed” him. He believed that this might have occurred. He admitted having had such sexual relations with his brother when a boy.

And J. E. Lighter’s Historical Dictionary of American Slang cites Henry N. Cary’s Sexual Vocabulary, a typescript from c. 1920, as glossing the noun cornhole as the “anus.” So it’s pretty clear that the sexual sense was in oral circulation in the opening years of the last century.

While the term started out as gay slang at the start of the twentieth century, by century’s end it had become generally familiar to heterosexuals, making its way into mainstream entertainment in the 1990s. The MTV animated series Beavis and Butt-Head featured an alter-ego of Beavis named Cornholio; that is Beavis with his t-shirt pulled over his head and saying things like “I am Cornholio, I need TP for my bunghole.” Cornholio made his debut in season 4, episode 29, “Generation in Crisis,” which aired 14 July 1994.

And the sitcom Arrested Development (S1E3, “Bringing Up Buster,” 16 November 2003) contained a conversation between Lucille Bluth, played by the inimitable Jessica Walter, and her son Michael about her other son, Buster, with a line that will forever live rent free in my head:

LUCILLE: Everyone’s laughing and riding and cornholing except Buster.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LntVJf9UG3g

Jason Bateman, who plays Michael, is also one of the stars of DTF St. Louis.

The cornholing double entendre in the Arrested Development scene doesn’t involve the beanbag game. It is playing off another trope in the show, the “Cornballer,” a defective deep fryer for balls of corn meal that burned the hands of anyone who tried to use it. Still the word’s use on the show demonstrates that the sexual sense was well established enough to be a joke on network television at the same time the game of cornhole was rising in popularity.

As to the etymology of the anal intercourse sense, that, like the origin of most slang terms, is more guesswork than fact. There is a literal sense of cornhole, meaning a hole in which a corn seed is planted, that dates to the seventeenth century. It seems likely that the sense of an anus came from this, and the verb from this anatomical sense. The origin of the name of the game is less mysterious, although it too is not known with absolute certainty—the bags were originally filled with dry corn kernels and the hole, obviously, refers to the target hole in the board.

And while the game of cornhole is played in earnest, I would not be entirely surprised if the name was coined as a kind of inside joke, with full knowledge of the carnal sense, a case of Middle America “owning the libs” on the coasts and enjoying the shocked looks on their faces when they hear the name of the game for the first time.

Sources:

Classified Ad. Cincinnati Post (Ohio), 13 July 2001, 12C/10. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Classified ad. Plain Dealer (Cleveland, Ohio), 4 March 1979, Section 7, 1/1. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“Cornholio.” Beavis and Butt-Head Wiki. Accessed 25 March 2026. Fandom.com.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, accessed 24 March 2026, s.v. cornhole, n., cornhole, v.

Kempf, Edward J. Psychopathology. St. Louis: C. V. Mosby, 1920, 676. HathiTrust Digital Library.

Lighter, J. E. Historical Dictionary of American Slang, vol. 1 of 2. New York: Random House, 1994, s.v. cornhole, n.

Oxford English Dictionary Online, September 2021, s.v. cornhole, n., cornhole, v.; June 2021, s.v. beanbag, n.