Now that the National Women’s Soccer League‘s regular season is in full swing, it seems like the appropriate time to ask: where in the world does the word soccer come from? The European name for the sport, football, makes perfect sense for a game in which you can only use your feet to touch the ball. But soccer?

Apparently, the story goes something like this.

Football came first. We’re talking raw soccer in the streets. As it grew in popularity, a group formed to create official rules for the game: the Football Association. Not long after, another sport – similar, yet distinctly different from football – came to prominence: Rugby Football. For more parallelism (because it was the proper Brits who named everything), the two sports were called Rugby Football and Association Football.

Rugby Football obviously was shortened to rugby or even rugger.

Association Football followed a similar path. Dropping the Football portion of the name, Association was still too long. That being said, there was understandably not a lot of motivation to shorten Association to its first syllable. Next option? Well, the next syllable of course! And just as rug-by became rugg-er, soc became soc-cer.

Or something like that.

Oh, and side note – yet another sport grew as a hybrid of Rugby Football and Association Football. Picking up mostly in the U.S., it became known as American Football. And that is why a game played primarily with players’ hands has the word foot in it.

Happy WordNerd Wednesday! See you next week for more language history! As always, comment below with words you’d like to see explained in coming weeks.

Cheers!