it:
(also ‘tip‘, ‘tig‘, ‘tiggy‘, ‘dob‘, ‘chasey‘, etc.; plural: the same ‘it‘; the letter ‘i’ rhymes with the letter ‘i’ in “ink” — for the right pronunciation, please click here)
a player in a group game called ‘tag’, usually played by children, in which a player — it — chases/finds out and catches another player who in turn becomes an ‘it’ and tries to find out and catch others,
children playing ‘tag’: the one in green shirt is ‘it’; and the one in pink hat is ‘he’
In the game of tag, the player who chases is called an ‘it’ and the player who is chased is called a ‘he’.
There are several variations in the internationally played game of ‘tag’; there are exceptions for the ‘he’ to be tagged: the most common one is when the ‘he’ says the ‘truce word/term’, like ‘rest’ or ‘break’ or something else just before the ‘it’ is going to touch or tag them; when the ‘he’ touches something, some structure on the play ground,that has been agreed on by all the players before the start of the game; and when ‘he’ is in the ‘gool’, a safe place, like a platform or a stone slab on the ground.
It’s sad to learn that this game of ‘tag’, popular among children all over the world, has been banned in the USA and UK because of some accidents in which some ‘it’ and ‘he’ (players) were injured or dead, and some other children who were not in the game but playing other games on the same ground met with accidents when the ‘tag’ players bumped hard into them.
(A) The “it” in a tag game is the one who has to chase and touch or tag others, called ‘he’.
(B) Our grandpa thinks that any kind of tag game is a great game and he also thinks it is an inexpensive game which needs little or no preparation at all.
In sentence (A) the words “it” and ‘he’ are nouns referring to the players in the game of ‘tag’. In sentence (B), however, ‘it’ and ‘he’ are pronouns, personal pronouns: ‘it’ referring to the game of ‘tag’, a noun, and ‘he’ referring to ‘our grandpa’, a noun.
