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How to Identify Marbles With Terminology

Children have played with marbles for thousands of years, since the days of ancient Egypt. For many centuries they were made from polished marble, clay or china. It wasn't until the 1850s that glass marbles began to be produced on a commercial basis, and that's when the huge array of attractive marbles were introduced.

Instructions

- 1
  Identify any particularly common marbles. The most common of all is the "Leaf Insert" marble, adorned with a simple leaf-shaped core of colored glass. The "Cat's Eye," another widely seen marble, has a small multicolored core.
- 2
  Look for clear glass marbles -- or "clears" -- patterned on the inside with deliberate stripes of color. These are known as "swirls." A swirl with added copper filings to make it glisten is called a "Lutz."
- 3
  Turn to any opaque glass marbles decorated with stripes. Marbles with stripes over a creamy background are called "Clambroths." "Indian and Peppermint Swirls" are like the Clambroth except that the body of the marble contains at least some black glass.
- 4
  Consider any marbles without a deliberate pattern. "Onionskins" are marbles with a mottled, multicolored surface. "Mica Snowflakes" have chips of mica suspended in clear glass. "Slag" and "End of Day" marbles are made from pieces of colored glass squashed together at random.

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