A
truce term is a
word or short
phrase accepted within a community of children as an effective way of calling for a temporary respite or
truce during a game or activity, such as
tag or its variants. Common examples in
English speaking cultures are
barley,
fainites,
crosses and
kings in the United Kingdom,
pegs and
nibs in
New Zealand and variants of
barley in Australia. In the United States, terms based on
time-out have, from the 1950s onwards, largely supplanted earlier common terms based on
kings exe . Since the late 1980s
time-out has been recorded in other
English speaking cultures besides the US. Examples of use of truce terms are if a child has a
stitch or wants to raise a point on the rules of the game.