English
football
Football comes from Middle English fotbal.
attested reconstructed ? uncertain or disputed deepest recorded ancestor
- 1 Wiktionary, English football
- Earliest quotation in Wiktionary’s entry: 1581, Richard Mulcaster, Of the Ball: “[page 104] [T]he Footeball play, […] could not poſſibly…”.
Lineage
- Middle Englishc. 1150–1500fotbalWiktionary, English football
- Englishearliest quotation 1581footballWiktionary, English football. Earliest quotation in Wiktionary’s entry: 1581, Richard Mulcaster, Of the Ball: “[page 104] [T]he Footeball play, […] could not poſſibly…”
A compound of fot ‘a foot’ + bal ‘a ball’
Proto-Indo-European *ped- ‘to walk, to step’
Proto-Indo-European *pṓds ‘foot’
Proto-Germanic *fōts ‘foot’
Proto-West Germanic *fōt ‘foot’
Old English fōt ‘an organ in humans and animals used for locomotion’
Middle English fot ‘a foot’
Proto-Indo-European *bʰel- ‘to sound’
Proto-Germanic *balluz ‘round object, ball’
Old English *beall ‘ball’
Middle English bal ‘a ball’
The story
From Middle English fotbal, footbal, equivalent to foot + ball, because the ball was primarily manipulated with the feet in early versions of the game (though some modern varieties involve more handling than kicking). The name for the briefcase is a play on “dropkick”, the code name of an early version of the nuclear war plan.
Every English word from Middle English fotbal
Today it means
noun A sport played on foot in which teams attempt to get a ball into a goal or zone defended by the other team.
Sources
Sources: Wiktionary, “football”. By Wiktionary contributors, CC BY-SA 4.0, via kaikki.org (dump of Oct 3 2026); text adapted and restructured. Language periods are conventional ranges, not dates for this word. License.
Etymograph / Middle English fotbal / football