Crossword clues for football
football
- Any of various games played with a ball (round or oval) in which two teams try to kick or carry or propel the ball into each other's goal
- Pete Rozelle's domain
- No game for the tame
- Game in which at least two men come to pass
- Gambling on soccer results
- Ball game
- Grid game
- Word used for two different sports, either of which works for this contest
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
The Collaborative International Dictionary
football \foot"ball`\, n.
An inflated ball to be kicked in sport, usually made in India
rubber, or a bladder incased in Leather.
--Waller.
Note: The American football is an oblate spheroid, with pointed ends. In other countries, the football is the same as a soccer ball. The games played with the two different balls are different. In the United States, the game played with a soccer ball is called soccer.
2. The game played with a football[1], by two opposing teams
of players moving the ball between goals at opposite ends
of a rectangular playing field. Outside the United States
football refers to soccer, and in England, also to rugby,
but in the United States the shape of the ball and the
rules of the game are different.
--Arbuthnot.
3. Soccer or rugby. [Brit.]
4. [fig.] Something which is treated in a rough manner, usually as part of a dispute; as, a political football.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
open-air game involving kicking a ball, c.1400; in reference to the inflated ball used in the game, mid-14c. ("Ãe heued fro þe body went, Als it were a foteballe," Octavian I manuscript, c.1350), from foot (n.) + ball (n.1). Forbidden in a Scottish statute of 1424. One of Shakespeare's insults is "you base foot-ball player" [Lear I.iv]. Ball-kicking games date back to the Roman legions, at least, but the sport seems first to have risen to a national obsession in England, c.1630. Figurative sense of "something idly kicked around, something subject to hard use and many vicissitudes" is by 1530s. \n
\nRules of the game first regularized at Cambridge, 1848; soccer (q.v.) split off in 1863. The U.S. style (known to some in England as "stop-start rugby with padding") evolved gradually 19c.; the first true collegiate game is considered to have been played Nov. 6, 1869, between Princeton and Rutgers, at Rutgers, but the rules there were more like soccer. A rematch at Princeton Nov. 13, with the home team's rules, was true U.S. football. Both were described as foot-ball at Princeton.\n\nThen twenty-five of the best players in college were sent up to Brunswick to combat with the Rutgers boys. Their peculiar way of playing this game proved to Princeton an insurmountable difficulty; .... Two weeks later Rutgers sent down the same twenty-five, and on the Princeton grounds, November 13th, Nassau played her game; the result was joyous, and entirely obliterated the stigma of the previous defeat.
["Typical Forms of '71" by the Princeton University Class of '72, 1869]
Wiktionary
n. 1 (context general English) A sport played on foot in which teams attempt to get a ball into a goal or zone defended by the other team. 2 (context UK uncountable English) association football: a game in which two teams each contend to get a round ball into the other team's goal primarily by kicking the ball. Known as soccer in Canada, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand. 3 (context US uncountable English) American football: a game in which two teams attempt to get an ovoid ball to the end of each other's territory. 4 (context Canada uncountable English) Canadian football: a game played on a wide field in which two teams attempt to get an ovoid ball to the end of each other's territory. 5 (context Australia Victoria South Australia Western Australia Tasmania Northern Territory uncountable English) Australian rules football. 6 (context Ireland uncountable English) 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. 7 (context Australia New South Wales Queensland uncountable English) rugby league. 8 (context Australia Ireland New Zealand English) rugby union 9 (context countable English) The ball used in any game called "football". 10 (context uncountable English) Practise of these particular games, or techniques used in them. 11 (context figuratively countable English) An item of discussion, particularly in a back-and-forth manner 12 (context slang countable English) The nickname of the leather briefcase containing classified nuclear war plans, which is always near the US President.
WordNet
n. any of various games played with a ball (round or oval) in which two teams try to kick or carry or propel the ball into each other's goal [syn: football game]
the inflated oblong ball used in playing American football
Wikipedia
A football is a ball inflated with air that is used to play one of the various sports known as football. In these games, with some exceptions, goals or points are scored only when the ball enters one of two designated goal-scoring areas; football games involve the two teams each trying to move the ball in opposite directions along the field of play.
The first balls were made of natural materials, such as an inflated pig bladder, later put inside a leather cover, which has given rise to the American slang-term "pigskin". Modern balls are designed by teams of engineers to exacting specifications, with rubber or plastic bladders, and often with plastic covers. Various leagues and games use different balls, though they all have one of the following basic shapes:
- a sphere: used in Association football and Gaelic football
- a prolate spheroid
- either with rounded ends: used in the rugby codes and Australian football
- or with more pointed ends: used in American football and Canadian football
The precise shape and construction of footballs is typically specified as part of the rules and regulations.
The oldest football still in existence, which is thought to have been made circa 1550, was discovered in the roof of Stirling Castle, Scotland, in 1981. The ball is made of leather (possibly from a deer) and a pig's bladder. It has a diameter of between , weighs and is currently on display at the Smith Art Gallery and Museum in Stirling.
Football is a family of sports that involve kicking a ball with the foot to score a goal.
Football may also refer to:
Football (released as NFL Football) is a multiplayer sports video game produced by Mattel and released for its Intellivision video game system in 1979. The players each control a football team competing in a standard four-quarter game. Like Mattel's other sports video games, NFL Football did not use any official National Football League team names or player names, even though Mattel obtained a license from the NFL and used the league's logo in its box art.
The English word football may mean any one of several team sports (or the ball used in that respective sport), depending on the national or regional origin and location of the person using the word. So where English is a first language the unqualified use of the word football is used to refer to the most popular code of football in that region. The sports most frequently referred to as simply football are association football, American football, Australian rules football, Canadian football, Gaelic football, rugby league football and rugby union football.
Of the 45 national FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association) affiliates in which English is an official or primary language, 43 use football in their organisations' official names ( Canada and the United States use soccer). Soccer is the prevailing term for association football in the U.S. and Canada, where other codes of football are dominant. In 2005, Australia's association football governing body changed its name from soccer to football to align with the general international usage of the term. In 2006, New Zealand decided to follow suit.
There are also many other languages where the common term for association football is phonetically similar to the English term football. (See the Names for association football article.)
Football is a family of team sports that involve, to varying degrees, kicking a ball with the foot to score a goal. Unqualified, the word football is understood to refer to whichever form of football is the most popular in the regional context in which the word appears. Sports commonly called 'football' in certain places include: association football (known as soccer in some countries); gridiron football (specifically American football or Canadian football); Australian rules football; rugby football (either rugby league or rugby union); and Gaelic football. These different variations of football are known as football codes.
Various forms of football can be identified in history, often as popular peasant games. Contemporary codes of football can be traced back to the codification of these games at English public schools during the nineteenth century. The expanse of the British Empire allowed these rules of football to spread to areas of British influence outside of the directly controlled Empire. By the end of the nineteenth century, distinct regional codes were already developing: Gaelic football, for example, deliberately incorporated the rules of local traditional football games in order to maintain their heritage. In 1888, The Football League was founded in England, becoming the first of many professional football competitions. During the twentieth century, several of the various kinds of football grew to become some of the most popular team sports in the world.
Football is a 1982 Indian Malayalam film, directed by Radhakrishnan (RK). The film stars Nedumudi Venu and Zarina Wahab in lead roles. The film had musical score by Johnson.
Usage examples of "football".
She turned the glasses to the Afghanis encamped below on the football field.
Bright emergency lights flashed on all over the estate, lighting up the area like a football field.
On West Auer Avenue, a man in a gray University of Michigan football T-shirt, gray cotton shorts, and flip-flops was washing a dark blue Toyota Camry in his short double-wheel-track driveway.
Rake had coached hundreds of games, and looked again at the silent bleachers where ten thousand people once gathered on Friday nights to pour their emotions upon a high school football team.
Laughter rose occasionally from one of the groups scattered throughout the home bleachers as someone told an old football story.
A soggy football went sailing past the window and a clatter of bogmen chasing after it.
Sandy Foster, football bohunk extraordinaire, leaned forward and handed them both cold beers, after throwing his own empty through the open T-top.
Like if a street bookie had a real heavy play on a horse or a football team, he could lay off some of his bets with Bobby.
If I expected to score by betting on fighters and football teams that had been doped with ZAP, I needed Bobby because he knew bookies all over , the country and could cobble up a giant swindle.
It reminded Borel of a North American high-school football field: same small wooden grandstands, and tents at the ends where the goal posts should be.
There, a mass of fifty thousand particles forms a single, eukaryotic Football Fan.
He had for years played the euphonium in the silver band at Airdrie until some baiter at a football ground had tossed a lighted firework into the bright gaping horn.
Sports buffs replaced baseball with falconry and polo in their Sunday afternoon television repertoire, and the big Thanksgiving game changed from football to soccer.
The football captain asked his advice as to whether there really was anything to all this Reading that he kept hearing about in his classes, and the leading bootlegger in the village gave Gid a box of thirty Turkish cigarettes.
But it seems that the reason Sam the Gonoph wishes to find Gigolo Georgie is to give him a good punch in the snoot, because it seems that Gigolo Georgie promotes Sam for several duckets to the large football game between the Harvards and the Yales to sell on commission, and never kicks back anything whatever to Sam.