“Football”: a simple word with striking roots

Football. Foot plus ball. Football. What more is there to say about the origin of this simple compound? Oh, I should know better than to make such assumptions about the history of words by now. 

“Let proclamation be made,” begins a passage from 1409, “that no person shall levy money, or cause it to be levied, for the games called ‘foteballe’ or ‘cokthresshyng,’ because of marriages that have recently taken place…”

That, my friends, is the earliest known evidence for the word football in English. From 1409. In the context of a ban. Right alongside something called … cock-threshing?

Football etymology and history

Translated from its original Norman French, the passage occurs in an 1868 collection, Memorials of London and London Life, comprising extracts from archives of the City of London dating back to the late 1200s. As I understand it, the proclamation specifically forbids raising contributions, presumably for the newlyweds, by charging people to play the games in celebration of their nuptials.

Now, in the Middle Ages, football was—OK, I’m burying the lede. In the Middle Ages, cock-threshing, also known as cock-throwing, was a folk pastime in which people would throw (thresh, thrash) sticks at tied-up roosters (cocks). To win, you knocked down—or worse, killed—the bird. Think of cock-threshing as an early, brutal carnival game.

Football, at the time, was also brutal—and violent, chaotic, and destructive enough that laws forbade it. Masses of villagers once joined in ruthless, ruleless games that amounted to free-for-alls with a ball. Hence the term mob football, as the proto-sport is sometimes called. I suspect, though, that the bans were also motivated in no small part by concerns over disruptions to labor.

Shrovetide and Hocktide games

Both football and cock-throwing erupted amidst the festivities of Shrovetide, a trio of days preceding the solemn season of Lent in the Christian calendar. Shrovetide was traditionally marked by confession—and, on its culminating Shrove Tuesday, one last round of revelry before Lent’s abstinences and penitences.

Shrove is the past tense of shrive, “to hear confession.” Confession was once known as shrift, surviving now in the expression short shrift.

It is not Shrovetide but another tide (festival) whose customs were subject to a ban in the rest of our 1409 passage. The occasion? Hocktide, falling on the second Monday and Tuesday after Easter. The activity? Its namesake hocking, wherein men and women would snatch and tie each other up—released if they paid a small ransom, which went to the church. Think of hocking as an early church fundraiser, which, if the 1409 prohibition is any indication, clearly got out of hand.

The origin of the Hock in Hocktide is notoriously obscure.

A very brief history of football as a sport

Across the world, ancient cultures enjoyed a great array of ball games, many of which involved feet. But it was those Shrovetide shindies that served as significant way stations in the evolution of modern football. (Versions of Shrovetide football are still raucously held today in some towns in the UK.)

Football varieties further developed—and diverged—in English boarding schools in the early modern period. Fast forward: the Football Association codified rules for the round-ball game in 1863 while the Rugby Football Union did the same for its oval-ball cousin in 1871. The former became known as association football, rendered soccer in the British school slang of the day. The latter became rugby, named for its birthplace, Rugby School in Warwickshire, England.

Around the same time across the pond, American football was taking shape from elements of both soccer and rugby, starting to settle into its distinct rules in the 1890s. 

The name football stuck in England and was borrowed across the European continent. Soccer spread abroad as a useful distinguisher in countries like the US and Australia that developed its own prevailing variants.

Now, to the origins of those key ingredients of the game: foot and ball. Rudimentary words, they may be, but boy, do they pack a punch, er, kick.

Foot etymology

Foot has not stepped far from its source: the Old English fót.

The Old English fót would have rhymed with note. The vowel of foot has since been shortened from that original long o.

The plural of foot is vexingly irregular: feet. It is also a textbook example of something known as i-mutation. 

Why is feet the plural of foot?

I-mutation refers to a sound change in which the articulation of vowels in the back of the mouth (like a long o) shifted to the front ahead of an i or y sound. 

It occurs because it makes the pronunciation of words easier and more efficient in everyday speaking. 

While not unique to Germanic languages, i-mutation did significantly and systematically shake them up around 1500 years ago. 

In the case of fōt, the plural became fēt. (The ancient Germanic plural of foot is believed to be *fotiz, with that wee vowel in -iz shifting the whole word into its eventual English feet.)

Old English fēt was pronounced like fate. It took on its current value over the course of another earthquake to English vowels, the Great Vowel Shift, starting in the 1400s.

While i-mutation affected English across parts of speech, it has left its most conspicuous mark on the irregular plurals of other nouns: tooth/teeth, mouse/mice, man/men.

Indo-European roots and cognates of foot

The Old English fōt in turn derives from the Proto-Germanic *fōts, which walked out of the Proto-Indo-European *ped-.

The Proto-Indo-European *ped- evolved into the Latin pēs (stem ped-) and the Greek πούς (poús, stem pod-). The stem is the form of the word to which inflections are added.

From the Latin pēs and its in-language relatives, English gets a troop of words, including such nouns as pawn, pedal, pedestal, pedestrian, pioneer, impediment, and millipede along with such verbs as expedite, impeach, impede, and even revamp.

From the Greek poús and its intralingual cousins, English ultimately gets podium, octopus, platypus, podiatry, polyp. Pilot and trapezoid, too, along with many more.

Plural of octopus: Since we’ve been discussing irregular plurals, what about the plural of octopus? Octopus comes from the Greek ὀκτώπους, (oktṓpous), “eight-footed.” Its plural in Greek is equivalent to octopodes. Latin borrowed the word—and its plural formation, also using a form equivalent to octopodes, not octopi. In English, you can just use octopuses for the plural of octopus.

My favorite cognate to the English foot, however, is pajamas (pyjamas), rooted in the Persian pāy (leg, foot) and jāma (clothing). The Persian pājāma refers to loose-fitting trousers, eventually appropriated by Westerners for night wear. Nevertheless, pajamas are “leg clothing”! 

Via Germanic offshoots, fetter, fetlock, and fetter are connected to the foot bone. Incredibly, the Latin-toed pessimism and peccadillo also belong here, developing from notions of “stumbling.”

Ball etymology

Scholars reasonably conclude ball rolls along from the Old English *beall. One reason for their confidence is record of beallucas, that is bollocks, glossing the Latin testiculī, that is testicles.

That is, balls.

Indo-European roots and cognates of ball

Whether soccer or scrotal, balls are so named because they are round. The root is Proto-Indo-European, taking the form of *bhel- and meaning of “to blow, swell”—extended not only to bullocks but also to the rest of the apparatus in the Greek-shafted phallus.

Balloon, ballot, boulder, bowl, bold, bulk, bull, bulwark and its derivative boulevard—all of these are related to ball at the Germanic language family reunion. Folly, fool, follicle are from Latin. Fool and its related folly are metaphorical bags of air; follicles are “little bags.”

“Nothing but ball-play”

Speaking of inflated bags, football was originally played with pig bladders. But before we return to ball sports, let’s touch on when ball was first evidenced in the English, not just compelling reconstructed in *beall.

That context would be in surnames:

The Oxford English Dictionary enters ball, for “rounded hill” or “knoll,” citing one “Alfwinus Attebal” in 1166. Mr. Attebal is literally Mr. “At-the-knoll,” presumably locating where our long-lost townsmen lived. Talk about a legacy, my man!

Fun fact: Alfwinus lives on as Alvin, by the way, and means “elf friend.” This is all starting to sound like a trip to Tolkien’s Shire…

Now, ball, as in the object we kick or throw, is first attested in the Ancrene Riwle, a monastic manual (riwle) for women religious recluses (known as ancrene, “anchorites”) penned in the early 1200s. 

The passage in Middle English: Iþe forme ȝeres nis hit bute bal plowe.

In Modern English: In the first years, it is nothing but ball-play.

No, you might be saying, our minds should not go there with, erm, ball-play. But in fact, dear readers, that’s exactly where it should go!

In this passage, the author is describing how the hermit is, counterintuitively, far more tempted by the sin of lust later in their isolation than early on. In the first years, apparently, celibacy is nothing but ball-play—it’s easy, like child’s play! Or maybe, to bring it all back to a medieval home, even like, um, cock-threshing!