The name Tetris combines “tetra,” meaning four, with tennis, Alexey Pajitnov’s favorite sport. The first part refers to the four square blocks that make up each tetromino, the falling pieces at the heart of the game.
Pajitnov developed Tetris in the mid-1980s while working at the Dorodnitsyn Computing Center in Moscow. His initial inspiration came from pentomino puzzles, whose pieces contain five squares. He decided that twelve pentomino shapes made the game unnecessarily complicated, so he reduced the design to tetrominoes. There are seven possible tetromino shapes used in standard Tetris.
The name is therefore a wordplay rather than a direct translation or a reference to a Russian word. “Tetra” supplies the numerical idea, while “tennis” supplies the personal touch. Chess is an understandable guess because Tetris was created by a computer researcher interested in puzzles, but it was not the sport Pajitnov cited.
The title also became useful internationally because it was short, distinctive and connected directly to the game’s four-block pieces. Later versions retained the name across dozens of platforms and many different rule variations.