Goal

How to spell goal

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce goal

What does goal mean?

1. nounAn aim or result that a person works to achieve.
2. nounIn games such as football or hockey, the structure the ball must enter, or a point scored by doing so.

Goal in a sentence

• Her main goal this year is to clear the credit card debt.

• The striker scored the winning goal in the final minute.

• The team set a realistic sales goal for the next quarter.

• The keeper stood firmly in front of the goal to block the shot.

Where does goal come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The origin of 'goal' is genuinely murky, which is part of its charm. It surfaces in Middle English around the early 1500s as 'gol', meaning a boundary or limit, and by extension the finishing point of a race. One likely ancestor is the Old English verb 'gælan', which meant 'to hinder' or 'to delay', so a goal may originally have been the obstacle or marker that stopped a runner. From the literal finish line, the meaning broadened to any endpoint a person aims at, giving us today's sense of an objective or ambition. Much later, in the nineteenth century, the word attached itself to organised sports, naming both the structure a ball is driven into and the point scored by doing so. Because the spelling has only one tricky feature, the silent stretch of the 'oa' vowel, it stays simple, but the word's deep history is genuinely uncertain, so any tidy story about it should be treated with caution.

How the word is built

• goal (single root, no affixes; from Middle English gol meaning 'boundary' or 'limit')