The rules of football were codified in England by The Football Association in 1863, and the name association football was coined to distinguish the game from the other versions of football played at the time. The word soccer is a colloquial abbreviation of association (from assoc.) and first appeared in the 1880s. 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. In the late 19th century the word soccer tended to be used only at public schools; most people knew the game simply as football. Today the term association football is rarely used, although some clubs still include Association Football Club (AFC) in their name. The game is sometimes known colloquially as footie; the term footer was also once used but is now obsolete.


A traditional footballFootball was exported by expatriate Britons to much of the rest of the world and many of these nations adopted this common English term for the sport into their own language. This was usually done in one of two ways: either by directly importing the word itself, or by translating its constituent parts, foot and ball. Most Romance languages use the word football, albeit with a different pronunciation and occasionally a different spelling (Spanish: fútbol, Portuguese: futebol). In French, le football is often shortened to le foot, and in Quebec the word is le soccer. By way of contrast, Germanic languages usually translate the term (for example, German: Fußball, Norwegian: fotball, Swedish: fotboll, Danish: fodbold, Dutch: voetbal). Finnish (jalkapallo) and Arabic (kurat al qadam) also use translated terms.

In Italy, football is called calcio, from calciare meaning to kick. This is due to the game's resemblance to Calcio Fiorentino, a 17th century ceremonial Florentine court ritual, that has now been revived under the name il calcio storico (historical kick or kickball in costume).

Aside from the name of the game itself, other foreign words based on English football terms include versions in many languages of the word goal (often gol in Romance languages) and schútte (Basel) or tschuutte (Zurich), derived from the English shoot, meaning 'to play football' in German-speaking Switzerland. There's also nogomet in Croatian and Slovene which is composed of the words for "foot" and "target".

Football is more commonly known as soccer in certain English-speaking nations where the word football refers to a rival code of football developed within that nation, specifically Australia, Canada, the Republic of Ireland and the United States, and also in nations where Rugby football is more popular, such as New Zealand and South Africa. In these countries football was often included in the names of the earliest leagues and governing bodies of the sport, but as that word became increasingly associated with the domestic form of the game so soccer became more widely used. For example, the governing body of the game in the US is the United States Soccer Federation. This body was originally called the US Football Association, and was formed in 1913 by the merger of the American Football Association and the American Amateur Football Association. The word soccer was added to the name in 1945, making it the US Soccer Football Association, and it did not drop the word football until 1974, when it assumed its current name.

Outside these countries the word soccer has not been commonly used and football remains by far the most common name to describe the sport, being the name officially used by both FIFA, the sport's world governing body, and the International Olympic Committee. However, the use of soccer is on the rise, perhaps due to the global influence of American culture on the English language.