Hello, you have come here looking for the meaning of the word football. In DICTIOUS you will not only get to know all the dictionary meanings for the word football, but we will also tell you about its etymology, its characteristics and you will know how to say football in singular and plural. Everything you need to know about the word football you have here. The definition of the word football will help you to be more precise and correct when speaking or writing your texts. Knowing the definition offootball, as well as those of other words, enriches your vocabulary and provides you with more and better linguistic resources.
From Middle Englishfotbal, footbal, equivalent to foot + ball, which may refer to the act of kicking a ball with the feet. The name for the briefcase is a play on “dropkick”, the code name of an early version of the nuclear war plan.
Each team scored three goals when they played football.
(US,uncountable)American football: a game played on a field 100 yards long and 53 1/3 yards wide in which two teams of 11 players attempt to get an ovoid ball to the end of each other's territory.
Each team scored two touchdowns when they played football.
(Canada,uncountable)Canadian football: a game played on a field 110 yards long and 65 yards wide in which two teams of 12 players attempt to get an ovoid ball to the end of each other's territory.
(Ireland,uncountable)Gaelic football: a field game played with similar rules to hurling, but using hands and feet rather than a stick, and a ball, similar to, yet smaller than a soccer ball.
1994, Herbert L. Abrams, The President Has Been Shot: Confusion, Disability, and the 25th Amendment, Stanford University Press, →ISBN, page 126:
The aide rides, along with the president's physician, in the “control car,” third in line in the motorcade. He is responsible for the football (or “black box” or “black bag”), a briefcase containing the codes and targeting information the president would require to order or authorize a nuclear attack.
After the lunch broke, we walked to the Trump-Putin press conference, which started about 6 p.m. As Kelly observed to me at some point, there were now two military aides in the room, each carrying his country's nuclear football.
Usage notes
In the US the term 'football' is used in almost all contexts to mean American Football, contrary to the UK, which calls 'Association Football' (soccer) football
The translations below need to be checked and inserted above into the appropriate translation tables. See instructions at Wiktionary:Entry layout § Translations.
1969, Alec Hugh Chisholm, The Joy of the Earth, page 358:
It was an announcement of the outbreak of what is now termed World War I. Some of us lads were footballing when we heard the news. It left us bewildered.
2019, David Randall, Suburbia: A Far from Ordinary Place:
You walked up our road, passed the elms that bordered our park until Dutch disease killed them in the early 1970s, diagonally crossed its field where we footballed, turned right at the drinking fountain and cattle trough […]