in Antiquity, a quoit, or circular plate of stone or metal, ten or twelve inches in diameter, which was used by the ancients for throwing to a distance as a gymnastic exercise. Sometimes a kind of quoit of a spherical form was used for the same purpose; and through a hole in its centre a thong was passed, to assist the player in throwing it. (See Iliad ii., xxiii.; Od. viii., xvii.) In the British Museum there is a famous statue of a discobolus in the act of throwing the discus.