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PlainSpell

football

foot·ballUK /ˈfʊt.bɔːl/noun, verb

football is spelled F-O-O-T-B-A-L-L, 2 syllables: foot·ball. The wrong spelling people search most is foootball: about 120 Bing searches a month in the United States (September 2025 to August 2026), about 1 in 833 of all searches for the word. Football is a noun meaning “A sport played on foot in which teams attempt to get a ball into a goal or zone defended by the other team”. The plural of football is footballs.

How do you spell football?

Football is spelled F-O-O-T-B-A-L-L. One wrong spelling is searched or written often enough to measure; together they are about 1 in 813 of the searches for football in either form.

footballthe right spelling97,480 searches a month
foootballan extra o120 searches a month

Bing searches in the United States: the average month from September 2025 to August 2026 (Microsoft Advertising keyword data through DataForSEO, read September 30, 2026). Wrong spellings are taken from Wiktionary entries tagged "misspelling" and its obsolete or nonstandard forms, Wikipedia's Lists of common misspellings and the codespell dictionary, then measured. The proofreader's marks show the change that corrects each one.

What does football mean?

noun

  1. 1

    A sport played on foot in which teams attempt to get a ball into a goal or zone defended by the other team.

    Roman and medieval football matches were more violent than any modern type of football.

  2. 2

    The ball used in any game called "football".

    The player kicked the football.

  3. 3

    UKAssociation football, also called soccer: a game in which two teams each contend to get a round ball into the other team's goal primarily by kicking the ball.

    Each team scored three goals when they played football.

  4. 4

    USAmerican 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.

  5. 5

    CanadaCanadian 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.

    They played football in the snow.

  6. 6

    AustraliaAustralian rules football.

  7. 7

    IrelandGaelic 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.

  8. 8

    AustraliaAny form of rugby.

verb

  1. 1

    rareTo play football.

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

How do you pronounce football?

  • UK /ˈfʊt.bɔːl/
  • UK [ˈfʊʔtbɔːl]
  • UK [ˈfʊʔt̚bɔːl]

Football has 2 syllables, split foot·ball in writing.

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Recordings: En-au-football.oga, Wikimedia Commons (author and licence on each file's page).

Forms of football

  • footballs plural, present, singular, he/she/it
  • footballing participle, present
  • footballed participle, past

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

How common is football?

Football appears 129 times per million words in written English, the 810th most frequent word form in the list.

Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).

How do you abbreviate football?

Wiktionary records one abbreviation of football: fb.

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

Football in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese

LanguageWords
Frenchfootball, foot, soccer (association football), football australien (game in Northern Territory, South Australia…), rugby à XIII (game in New South Wales, Queensland), ballon de foot (ball)
GermanFußball, Fussball (association football), Australian Football (game in Northern Territory, South Australia…)
Portuguesefutebol (association football), bola de futebol, esférico (ball)
Spanishfútbol, futbol, balompié, pambol, fulbito, fútbol llanero (association football)

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Translations are Wiktionary's, by sense; a linked word has its own PlainSpell page.

Where does football come from?

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).

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).