 Football. Has there ever been a more heated disagreement about what a word refers to? Personally, I call this football and this soccer, as do most people in the US, even those who, like myself, care more about this than this. Meanwhile, to people from elsewhere in the world, football more often refers to this, and there just isn't a word for this because no one cares about this. And that's not the only point of confusion, because it turns out there are loads of games that people call football, and generally the word refers to whichever is most popular in your particular region. In addition to American football and association football, there's Gaeluk football, Canadian football, Australian football, and two different versions of rugby that are all frequently just called football. Why do all of these different sports have the same name? Well, basically, because originally they all started out as variations of the same game. Let's go back a little bit to the Middle Ages. Despite the fact that some people claimed that this has more of a right to the word football than this, because you use your feet more, it actually looks like originally these games were called football because they were played on foot, as opposed to the games of the aristocrats, which were played on horseback, like polo. We don't know much about these early forms of football, besides that they were incredibly violent and often destroyed property because they were played in the streets of cities a lot, with opposite edges of town serving as the goals. The earliest version we have any specifics about is Cambridge Rules Football, a set of rules created by Cambridge as a compromise between all of the local rules of different universities. It was pretty similar to modern, uh, okay. For the rest of the video, to avoid confusion, I'm going to call this soccer, this rugby, this, I don't know, let's go with hand egg, and all of them football. Cool, okay. So, Cambridge's rules were pretty similar to modern soccer, with only a few differences. For instance, you were allowed to catch the ball with your hands, but you couldn't run with it, and had to immediately kick it or put it on the ground. This game eventually evolved into association football, which was shortened to ass oak, which became soccer, which became soccer. However, a different type of game was played in the city of rugby in central England. According to legend, this version started when this one guy just picked up the soccer ball and started running forward with it. This is probably a myth, since there's evidence that there were versions of this game played with your hands that go all the way back to the Middle Ages, but at any rate, this was the version most popular in the city of rugby, so that's what people started calling it. Meanwhile, in America, rugby had spread to Harvard, but they changed the rules so that you put the ball into play differently. In rugby, they have this thing called a scrum, where you put the ball between this big, massive player, so then they just kind of push each other and wrestle over it. At Harvard, they substituted this with scrimmage, where the ball was awarded to one team who would then pass it to a player behind them. This allowed one team to keep the ball for way too long, though, so after a few really boring games, they decided that if you didn't gain five yards or lose ten in four plays, the other team gets the ball. This made it really useful to mark the field with a grid, so this version became known as grid iron football, further subdivided into American football and Canadian football. Today, there are lots of different variations, which are popular in different regions. Australia has a version which is played on an oval-shaped field, and from what little I know about it seems halfway between soccer and rugby. Ireland has a version influenced by traditional Irish ball games called Gaelic football, which looks kinda two-third soccer, one-third rugby. Frankly, all the rules for anything besides soccer just confuse me. Anyway, if there's anything to take away from this video, it's that the word football is and has always been confusing and ambiguous, and if the context doesn't make it clear which version you're talking about, then you should expect to have to specify. I, for one, promise to start calling this hand-egg in ambiguous situations if people outside the US start calling this soccer when it's unclear. Do you have a specific word or group of words that have interesting histories? Let me know in the comments, and I'll see you next time.