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Australians generally call "soccer" as football. Recently their national soccer administrative body also renamed themselves as the Football Federation of Austr

Australians generally call "soccer" as football. Recently their national soccer administrative body also renamed themselves as the Football Federation of Australia. I think "soccer" is an Americanism as well.

philwelch 6y ago
> I think "soccer" is an Americanism as well. It isn't. It was originally Oxford slang derived from "association football": > The rules of association football were codified in the United Kingdom by the Football Association in 1863, and the name association football was coined in the UK to distinguish the game from the other versions of football played at the time, in particular rugby football. The word soccer is an abbreviation of association (from assoc.) and first appeared in English private schools and universities in the 1880s (sometimes using the variant spelling "socker").[1][2][3][4] The word is sometimes credited to Charles Wreford-Brown, an Oxford University student said to have been fond of shortened forms such as brekkers for breakfast and rugger for rugby football (see Oxford -er). Clive Toye noted "they took the third, fourth and fifth letters of Association and called it SOCcer." ... > For nearly a hundred years after it was coined, soccer was an accepted and uncontroversial alternative in Britain to football, often in colloquial and juvenile contexts, but was also widely used in formal speech and in writing about the game.[6] "Soccer" was a term used by the upper class whereas the working and middle class preferred the word "football"; as the upper class lost influence in British society from the 1960s on, "football" supplanted "soccer" as the most commonly used and accepted word. There is evidence that the use of soccer is declining in Britain and is now considered there as an American English term.[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_for_association_football https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_for_association_football In other words, even in England, the word "football" was originally ambiguous enough to also refer to rugby, which is why England coined the term "soccer" to distinguish the two sports. American and Canadian football are both descended from rugby football.

philwelch 6y ago

> I think "soccer" is an Americanism as well. It isn't. It was originally Oxford slang derived from "association football": > The rules of association football were codified in the United Kingdom by the Football Association in 1863, and the name association football was coined in the UK to distinguish the game from the other versions of football played at the time, in particular rugby football. The word soccer is an abbreviation of association (from assoc.) and first appeared in English private schools and universities in the 1880s (sometimes using the variant spelling "socker").[1][2][3][4] The word is sometimes credited to Charles Wreford-Brown, an Oxford University student said to have been fond of shortened forms such as brekkers for breakfast and rugger for rugby football (see Oxford -er). Clive Toye noted "they took the third, fourth and fifth letters of Association and called it SOCcer." ... > For nearly a hundred years after it was coined, soccer was an accepted and uncontroversial alternative in Britain to football, often in colloquial and juvenile contexts, but was also widely used in formal speech and in writing about the game.[6] "Soccer" was a term used by the upper class whereas the working and middle class preferred the word "football"; as the upper class lost influence in British society from the 1960s on, "football" supplanted "soccer" as the most commonly used and accepted word. There is evidence that the use of soccer is declining in Britain and is now considered there as an American English term.[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_for_association_football https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_for_association_football In other words, even in England, the word "football" was originally ambiguous enough to also refer to rugby, which is why England coined the term "soccer" to distinguish the two sports. American and Canadian football are both descended from rugby football.