soccer

Formssoccers, soccering, soccered

1. 1
   nounAustraliaIrelandPhilippinesUSuncountable

   The game of association football, played by two teams who try to kick a round ball into the opposing goal.

   Soccer draws enormous television audiences across Europe and South America.

   Their school added soccer to its list of fall sports.

   Similarfootball, footy, footie

   Note

   A British coinage that now lives mostly abroad. Late-nineteenth-century Oxford and public-school slang clipped assoc., from association, and added -er, just as Rugby became rugger. Spellings wavered among socker, socca and soccer, and The Oxford Magazine of 1888 set Rugger beside Soccer. Today it is often the everyday name in the US, Australia, Ireland and the Philippines, while association football is the formal British term.

2. 2
   verbtransitive

   To kick the ball directly off the ground with the foot, rather than handling it with the hands.

   The midfielder soccered the loose ball through for a goal.

   When tackled near the boundary, players often soccer the ball forward to a teammate.

   Similarkick, boot

   Note

   Australian rules football makes a verb out of the name of the round-ball game for a kick taken straight off the ground. It takes the ball as its object: players soccer the ball along the ground, or through for a goal. It inflects like any regular verb, and the participle works as an adjective, so a goal kicked this way is a soccered goal.

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