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Why the weights are called what they are

Curling weight names sound like jargon invented to keep outsiders out. They are the opposite: almost every one of them is simply the name of the thing on the ice a stone thrown that hard would reach.

Last updated 2026-08-16

The pattern#

There are two families of weight name, and knowing which family a name belongs to tells you what it means without anybody explaining it.

1. Named after a landmark. Tee, back line, hack, board. Each one is a real thing on the ice, and the weight is "hard enough that the stone would stop there".
2. Named after a job. Control, normal, peel. These are all harder than board weight, and by then the stone has run out of sheet to stop on — so the names describe what the shot is for instead.

That is the whole system. The switch happens exactly where the ice ends, which is not a coincidence.

The landmark weights#

Tee weight#

The stone stops on the tee line, which runs straight through the middle of the house — so a tee weight draw finishes on the button. This is also called draw weight or button weight, and on the numbered scale it is a 7.

The word itself is much older than the shot. Tee is Scots for the mark you aim at, and it is the same word that golf later attached to the peg you start a hole from. The centre of a curling house has been the tee since long before anyone was timing stones.

Back line weight#

Six feet further: the stone finishes on the back line at the rear edge of the house. A 10 on the numbered scale, and the lightest weight that will reliably move another stone — which makes it the weight of choice when you want to remove something and keep your own stone in the house.

Hack weight#

Twelve feet past the back line are the two hacks at the far end, the footholds the other team pushes out of. A stone thrown at hack weight would come to rest right there. It is the standard soft takeout: enough to clear the target, gentle enough that you keep some say in where your own stone ends up.

The word hack is the older technology. Before rubber footholds were bolted to the ice, a curler cut — hacked — a notch into it to push from. The name outlived the practice by about a century.

Board weight#

Six feet further still, and the ice runs out: the back boards close off the end of the sheet at 144 feet from the delivering hack. A stone thrown at board weight rattles into them. It is the everyday takeout in club play, hard enough to be certain and slow enough to be predictable.

Some clubs say bumper weight for the same thing, after the padding on those boards.

The weights named after a job#

Past the boards there is nothing left to name, so the naming changes. These three are all "off the end of the sheet", and what separates them is intent.

Control weight#

The standard takeout in modern play, and the name is a claim about handling rather than about distance. A stone thrown at control weight is still slow enough to curl a useful amount, which means it can be thrown around the edge of a guard, and slow enough that the collision does something you can predict. It is the weight at which a takeout is still a shot with a plan rather than an eviction.

Normal weight#

Confusingly named, and the name is a historical accident: it is "normal" in the sense of what a takeout is if you do not qualify it. For a long time this was the default hit, and control weight was the specialist call. Modern teams have largely swapped the two, and the names did not follow.

Peel weight#

Maximum weight. To peel a guard is to strip it off the ice entirely — and, usually, to roll your own stone out of play as well, so the end resets to nothing rather than developing. That is not a failure of the shot; it is the point of it. A team defending a lead will peel guard after guard specifically to keep anything from being built.

Peel weight also travels almost straight, because a fast stone has no time to curl. That is why it is the guard-removing weight: there is no drift for the other team to have accounted for, and no drift for you to get wrong.

All of them, in order#

Distances are from the delivering hack on an open sheet, and the sheet itself ends at 144 ft — so the last three rows describe stones that would never stop on the ice at all. That is what makes them takeouts.

While we are here: the rest of the vocabulary#

Curling's words are almost all Scottish and almost all literal, which makes them much easier to keep straight once you know what they were describing. A few are folk etymologies rather than documented ones, and those are marked.

• Curling — from the stone's curl, or possibly from an old Scots verb curr, for the low growling noise a granite stone makes running over pebbled ice. The noise is real; the derivation is disputed.
• House — the target rings. The word is old and simply meant the scoring area.
• Button — the one-foot circle at the centre, named for looking like one. The exact centre point is the pin, and it really is a pin: the pivot for the measuring stick.
• End — one set of sixteen stones, so called because you play to one end of the sheet and then to the other.
• Skip — short for skipper. The player in charge, who calls every shot and throws last.
• Vice — the vice-skip, who takes over the house when the skip throws, and who agrees the score with the other team's vice.
• Hog line — a stone that fails to reach it is hogged. The usual explanation is that a hog was a lamb too weak to survive its first winter, so a stone too weak to reach the house was one too. Widely repeated; not securely documented.
• Biter — a stone just biting the edge of the outer ring.
• Burned stone — a moving stone touched by a broom or a player. It is removed, or replaced where it would have finished, depending on the level of play and how much everyone likes each other.
• Bonspiel — a curling tournament. Probably from Dutch or Low German roots meaning something like "league play", from the era when the Low Countries and Scotland traded constantly.

Calling weight by number The shots, and what each is for