There are many plausible ways to explain the term, all of them based on a bull's eye, which is about the same size as the small black spot at the dead center of a target. Bull's-eye targets were not used in ancient archery contests, as is commonly thought, but were introduced to England as targets in rifle and hand-gun competitions. Perhaps the bull's-eyes in them were simply named for their resemblance to a bull's eye. But it is possible that bull's-eyes take their name from a British coin called the bull's-eye, which was worth a crown, or five shillings. This coin was in circulation in the early 1800s, about the time bull's-eye targets were introduced, and it would seem more likely that the flat target centers were named after the flat coins than named after the round eye of a bull. As for the coin, it was so named in the late seventeenth century, possibly because the one-crown piece was often bet on the outcome of bull-baiting contests: when a person put money “on the bull's eye” he or she was betting on the bull, just as today we are said to put a bet on a horse's nose.