Footballer

How to spell footballer

10 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce footballer

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does footballer mean?

1. nounA person who plays football, especially as a professional.

Footballer in a sentence

• The young footballer signed his first professional contract this week.

• A retired footballer now coaches the local youth team.

Where does footballer come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a transparent English compound, built from the much older word 'football' plus the agent suffix '-er' that turns an activity into the person who performs it. 'Foot' descends from the Old English 'fot', a thoroughly native Germanic word for the lower limb, while 'ball' came into Middle English from a Scandinavian and Germanic source meaning a round object. 'Football' itself is recorded from the 1400s, naming a game played on foot rather than on horseback as much as a game played by kicking. The compact form 'footballer' for a person who plays the game appears in the 1800s, when codified team football spread rapidly through British schools and clubs. Because each piece is a familiar everyday word, the only real spelling point is remembering the doubled 'l' in 'ball' that carries through into the longer form.

How the word is built

• foot (Old English fot: the foot)
• ball (a round object)
• -er (agent suffix: one who does)