Rugby

How to spell rugby

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce rugby

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does rugby mean?

1. nounA team ball game played in which the oval ball may be carried, kicked and passed by hand, and players tackle one another.

Rugby in a sentence

• The local rugby club trains on the muddy pitch every Tuesday evening.

• He broke his collarbone playing rugby at school.

Where does rugby come from?

Language of origin: Old Norse

Rugby is named after Rugby School in Warwickshire, England, where the distinctive handling game is traditionally said to have begun in 1823 when a pupil, William Webb Ellis, picked up the ball and ran with it during a game of football. The school takes its name from the town of Rugby, recorded in the Domesday Book of 1086 as 'Rocheberie'. The later spelling reflects the common English place-name ending '-by', borrowed from Old Norse 'byr', meaning a farmstead or settlement, which the Scandinavian settlers left scattered across the English Midlands and north. The first element is thought to derive from a personal name or from a word for a rocky place. By the 1860s the proper name of the school had become an ordinary noun for the sport itself, and that is why we still write the game with the same letters as the town, even though the word no longer feels like a place at all.

How the word is built

• Rugby (the English town and school where the game began) used as the name of the sport