"Keno" has Latin and French roots. The French translation of "quine" is five winning numbers, the Latin translation of "quini" is five each. The word Keno is derived from those two french and latin words. History states that the game originated in China. A false legend says that the invention of the game saved an ancient city during the time of a war and that its huge popularity helped to raise the funds which built the Great Wall of China. This was all deemed impossible since apparently the idea of using any type of lotteries to fund a public institution had not been accepted in China before the 19th century. There is no documentation of the Chinese lottery, also known as baige piao, prior to 1847 when the Portuguese Government of Macao decided to grant a licence to the lottery operators. The Portuguese then called this "white pigeon" lottery simply "a lotaria chinesa" ("The Chinese Lottery"
. It is rumored that some of the results of keno games in great cities were sent to outlying villages and small communities by carrier pigeon and this resulted in its Chinese name "baige piao" (pronounced pak-kop-piu in Cantonese) or "white pigeon tickets". The Chinese would play the game by using sheets that were printed with Chinese characters such as the first 80 characters of the **Thousand Character Classic. The winning characters were selected from these 80 characters. When the Chinese immigrants sailed across the Pacific to help build the American trans-continental railroad in the 19th century they eventually introduced keno to the West where the name was Westernized into boc hop bu and puck-apu.
**The Thousand Character Classic, is a chinese poem used as a primer for teaching chinese characters to children. It contains exactly 1000 unique characters. (from Wikipedia)
