I’m a gamer by nature and nurture. Board games. Cards. Puzzles. When I think back to my childhood, I have memories of Crazy Eights, Scrabble, Parcheesi, and The Game of Life. Battleship and Backgammon. Playing “Horse” in the driveway and Jarts in the backyard. Always playing something.

My dad could beat just about anyone in Trivial Pursuit and consistently ranked in the top timed finishers of the online daily New York Times crossword puzzle. One of his greatest aspirations in life was to be on Jeopardy. He qualified many times, but never got the call. My mom is a great card player. Bridge is her main game, but she has turned into quite a good euchre player in recent years.

As an adult, I’m still hooked. I wake up my brain by tackling the puzzles in the morning paper. Once the Jumble, Sudoku, KenKen, Cryptoquote, and Wonderword have been conquered, I feel ready to take on whatever the day has in store. On Sunday I face down The New York Times crossword puzzle. The Scrabble app on my phone is a constant companion.

Which brings me to jigsaw puzzles. I occasionally like to do a puzzle, and in recent years, they’ve become a holiday staple in our house. They have to be 1,000 piece and the only acceptable way to puzzle is to turn over all the pieces first, separate the edge pieces, and put the edge together first before venturing into the middle.

So far while Safer at Home, I’ve finished three that really tested my skills. They were each so challenging that the only way I finished was to separate the pieces by type and then painstakingly try to fit them in on by one. Which made me wonder: what are the different types of pieces called? I’ve touched tens of thousands of puzzle pieces in my life and can clearly picture the standard shapes but have no idea if they have names! So off to Google I go.

Well, there’s a good reason why I don’t know the names of the shapes – there aren’t any!

Despite a few attempts at a comprehensive classification of piece shapes and cutting designs, there is still no generally accepted nomenclature. Manufacturers use a variety of terms, as do puzzlers. Puzzle pieces can have “loops” and “sockets”, “knobs” and “holes”, “tabs” and “slots”, “keys” and “locks”, or any of several other alternative designations. — The jigsaw puzzle: piecing together a history by Anne Douglas Williams and Will Shortz

Now that’s puzzling.