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u/WiiDragon Jun 18 '26
Did that with Imperial system too
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u/BluetheNerd Jun 18 '26
Well not quite. We sort of moved over to the metric system. But like we didn't really commit. So we still measure long distance and speed with miles and mph. Also a lot of people still use stone and lbs for weight (though that's becoming less common in younger generations.) Pretty common to still measure height in feet and inches, but you'll usually measure length for DIY and hardware in MM, CM and M. The main thing we moved over was cooking really. We use Celsius for temps, grams and kg for weighing objects or ingredients, litres for fluids (apart from specifically milk and beer which is still pints). Like honestly I think the total utter half arsed commitment to moving to metric is somehow worse than not bothering at all. We've just ended up with an even more nonsense 50/50 system.
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u/KenseiHimura Jun 18 '26
Wait, so Britain actually has been doing the Canadian route? Do you just make fun of America for still using Imperial just because it’s a chance to rib us like Australia over the Emus?
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u/OhioTry Jun 18 '26
The United States uses metric for some things, though less than the Canada or Britain. Soda, wine and distilled spirits are measured in ml or liters, for instance, and electricity is in watts. Really, all of the anglophone countries use a confusing mix of Imperial and metric.
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u/Revoran Jun 18 '26 edited Jun 18 '26
Australia still uses imperial for the following:
* Human height (feet and inches, except at the doctor where you measure in cm)
* Dick size (inches)
* The length of a newborn baby (pounds and ounces)
* Screens (inches)
* Bicycle wheels (inches)
* Tyre pressue (PSI)
* Surfboard length (feet and inches)
* Pizzas (diameter in inches)
* Subway sandwiches (6 or 12 inch)
* Some old buildings or imported American cars will have fittings in imperial, so Bunnings (which you might know as Hammerbarn from Bluey) still sells imperial toolsWe also have our own special measurement system for the size of glasses at a pub, and it differs by state. Eg: schooner (different in Adelaide), middy, pot, 7, pint,
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u/Hallc Jun 18 '26
You forgot the best one.
We measure cars with Miles per Gallon but we price petrol/diesel at £/litre.
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u/DFrostedWangsAccount Jun 18 '26
Also, fun fact. Back when the US still could have easily switched to metric we had a set of precise metric weights shipped to the US from Fance iirc, and you'll never guess whose pirates stole that ship. And then they complain that we use a different system 200 years later lmao
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u/Baron-von-Dante Jun 18 '26
Not quite, but still very funny: https://youtube.com/shorts/180WNEQjfSw?is=i4GiyyJbqR_TJt0P
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u/HeroOfOakvale Jun 18 '26
The standard for an inch is 2.54 centimeters. It's all a façade
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u/racercowan Jun 18 '26
Kind of but not really, in two separate ways:
The British didn't entirely wean off of the Imperial system, it's still used for some measurements, I think in particular distance and weights.
The US doesn't actually use "Imperial" units, we use US Customary units. There are some small differences like the way that tons and ounces are defined, but a bif difference is that US Customary has actually just been metric in a trenchcoat since the 1980s. 1in=2.54cm isn't just an approximation, that's the actual definition of an inch nowadays.
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u/Saucererer Jun 18 '26
Specifically when weighing people we use stones and pounds, also when measuring people we use feet and inches, everything else is kg and m.
Same with beer and milk, they come in pints, but juices, fizzy drinks and wine come in ml
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u/Blueopus2 Jun 18 '26
Your new empire?
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u/DonChilliCheese Jun 18 '26
Better to recognize your mistake than sticking to it forever
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u/TheSteelPhantom Jun 18 '26
forever
Imperial introduced in 1824... U.K. began transition to metric in 1965... just 61 years ago. Is "forever" to you 61 years??
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u/FerusGrim Jun 18 '26
Do you think most people who use the word "forever" are actually using the word to mean "since the dawn of time and until the heat death of the universe"?
Considering someone might say "this line at Disney land is taking forever!", I think it's fair to say that 61 years is a long time.
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u/DonChilliCheese Jun 18 '26
Did you read that wrong? I'm talking about the US seemingly sticking to it forever unlike Britain who at least is trying to change it
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Jun 18 '26
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u/Cold-Iron8145 Jun 18 '26
It makes for a great story: when settlers moved from England to the Americas from the 17th Century, their speech patterns stuck in place. That was particularly true in more isolated parts of the US, such as on islands and in mountains. As a result, the theory goes, some Americans speak English with an accent more akin to Shakespeare’s than to modern-day Brits.
That’s not entirely right. The real picture is more complicated.
?
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u/intractabledonkey Jun 18 '26
Think about it. that's patently false. Americans now don't sound like they did even 80 years ago. There is no single British accent, the accents in Britain range from Scouse to Glaswegian to RP with thousands in-between. which accent is more similar? and for that matter, which American accent are you counting as the standard? you guys don't all talk the same.
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u/Old_Gimlet_Eye Jun 18 '26
All dialects are constantly drifting and won't sound the same now as they did a hundred years ago or 250 years ago, but the argument is that Accents in America have drifted more slowly.
I don't remember why that is, but no one is saying that brits 250 years ago would have sounded exactly like modern Americans.
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u/LovelyKestrel Jun 18 '26
I understand it is specifically Devon and near the border with Canada at the eastern end. A close-by Canadian accent is more similar to the modern Devon accent, though.
Anyway it makes no sense anyway, as you said. There features of many American accents, such as rhoticity and dropping h that have disappeared in many British accents.
I believe that dropping the l in words like solder is purely a north American invention, though.
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u/BroseppeVerdi Jun 18 '26
Check out the big brain on u/WiiDragon!
You a smart motherfucker, that's right!
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u/Exotic-Entertainer26 Jun 18 '26
But USAians don't use the Imperial system?
Some of the names are similar but the quantity under that name is different.
E.g US Gallons are about 1 litre smaller than a British Gallon.
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u/MSchmahl Jun 18 '26
Weirdly, U.S. customary units for liquids and dry goods are slightly different than Imperial units. The difference is small enough to be almost unnoticeable, but large enough to be confusing. For example, a U.S. pint is slightly less than ½ a liter, but an Imperial pint is noticeably more than ½ a liter.
U.S. customary measurements for liquids use powers of ½ all the way down to the ounce (whcih is ¹/32 of a quart). An Imperial fluid ounce is ¹/40 of a quart.
Fortunately, the U.S. and U.K. agree on the "pound (mass)" and the "mile".
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u/Crutation Jun 18 '26
Even the gallon is different in the US than the UK. The IS uses the wine gallon, which the IK used until 1820 (I think) when they UK changed the gallon to the volume of 10 pounds of water at room temperature.
So the Imperial gallon has more volume than the one used in the US
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u/SacredIconSuite2 Jun 18 '26
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u/rotj Jun 18 '26
Also the fact "soccer" being derived from "association football" is the same kind of diminutive slang like "barbie", "brekkie", or "Maccas" that "Aussies" love to use.
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u/whoknowsifimjoking Jun 18 '26
"-er" isn't an Australian thing, it's a British thing. "Copper" for example. "-ie" yes, "-er" less so.
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u/-fno-stack-protector Jun 18 '26
you're right as a rule but there's plenty of exceptions. see: macca's (AU) vs maccie's (UK)
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u/tarkardos Jun 18 '26
German speaker here: TIL "brekkie" means breakfast. I thought that's a cat food brand only (and used to describe dry cat food in general).
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u/Robey-Wan_Kenobi Jun 18 '26
The "-er" ending was a fad that students at Oxford did back in the 19th century. They added "-er" to a bunch of words like fiver, tenner, and soccer, as well as things like rugger for rugby and footer, another name for football.
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u/EnviousCipher Jun 18 '26
When you have 5 different categories of Football that are played consistently you need specific naming conventions to differentiate them.
If you ask a random Australian "are you going to watch the football" the majority of Victorians, Western Australians and South Australians will be referring to AFL. In NSW and Queensland you'll get a toss up between two codes of rugby or AFL, though Rural in either state will predominantly be Rugby.
You'll know the people who watch Soccer because they'll constantly remind you that its actchewally Football
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u/MuchNefariousness285 Jun 18 '26
Saved me the effort. Most Aussies do not refer to soccer as football, but the ones that do will absolutely insist upon it.
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u/Stormfly Jun 18 '26
In Ireland, it's the same.
Usually, it's people in the cities that say "Football and Gaelic" and people in the countryside say "Soccer and Football".
I grew up between the country and suburbs so I say "Soccer and Gaelic" but if someone says "Football", I'll default to Gaelic Football.
I jokingly call it the "Football line".
Moved to Dublin and got in a fair few arguments over it. West brits the lot of them...
Rugby Football is always just "Rugby".
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u/Bobblefighterman Jun 18 '26
In Australia we have an official line, called the Barassi Line. One side has Aussie Rules, the other has Rugby League. It's a very harsh divide, to the point that each side has a massive amount of people who've never even seen a League/AFL game, much less know how to play.
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u/TharrickLawson Jun 18 '26
or 'Ruggers' if you come from a certain subset of the population (upper class, boarding school educated, usually)
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u/gary-vault108 Jun 18 '26
This is what bugs me about the soccer vs football thing. British people and Spanish speaking countries will scream all day about “everyone else calls it football!!!” except for Americans, Canadians, South Africans, Aussies, and Kiwis and I’ve heard the Irish but idk about that one. Like damn, it sounds like everyone calls it fucking soccer as much as they call it football
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u/composedofidiot Jun 18 '26
If specificity is important why is the US one not called hand egg?
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u/Bobblefighterman Jun 18 '26
Because our most popular sports also use hands and eggs. We call it Gridiron.
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u/EnviousCipher Jun 20 '26
I can't tell if you're being serious. No one is suggesting you name the sport to be representative of whats literally being played.
Its "Football" because as has been described elsewhere its a game played with a ball on foot. How often a foot is used in manipulating said ball is neither here nor there.
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u/Balt603 Jun 18 '26
It's always been called Soccer more in Australia. Football is rugby league (NRL) in NSW and Queensland and it's Australian rules football (AFL) in the rest of the country.
It's a stupid argument anyway. Linguistically football means it's played on foot rather than on horseback. It's correct to call ANY ball game played on foot football.
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u/blazenite104 Jun 18 '26
Depends how into it you are. Most call it soccer. The ones actively watching internationally call it football.
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u/ICameForTheT Jun 18 '26
We absolutely call it soccer here
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u/7omdogs Jun 18 '26
We have 3 sporting codes that claim the word football and 2 that claim the word footy.
Soccer is used in basically every context to distinguish just because of this naming mess.
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Jun 18 '26 edited Sep 16 '26
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u/BKoala59 Jun 18 '26
Is it regional? I spent a couple months studying lizards in Northern Queensland and none of the Australians I was working with used football to talk about soccer. They all said soccer all the time. Football only meant Australian rules football to them
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u/PresterJohnson Jun 18 '26
We literally only call it soccer because the British young people who came to America for college introduced us to it and called it soccer because that was their slang word for it
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u/SecreteMoistMucus Jun 18 '26
That's kind of the point. Soccer is what the posh people called it, posh college kids spread it to America. If the upper class were still calling it soccer in the UK they would get clowned on too.
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u/Percinho Jun 18 '26
So talk me though how posh Soccer Saturday and Soccer AM are. Was Tim Lovejoy an Eton Old Boy?
This is all social media era nonsense, nobody really gave a shit in the 90s.
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u/TheGiftOf_Jericho Jun 18 '26
People always called in football, even through the 90's.
If you're wondering if TV shows represent the average folk or the more wealthy, the answer is pretty obvious.
Its always been more banter than actually caring though.
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u/SwordfishOk504 Jun 18 '26
Nah. It was just called "soccer" as a shortened/slang version of 'association football' as a way to distinguish it from "rugger" (rugby football). It's just post WW2 british rivalries that tried to turn into some major cultural issue.
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u/SecreteMoistMucus Jun 18 '26
It didn't need distinguishing from rugby among the working class, because they didn't give a shit about rugby and would not be talking about it often enough for it to be confusing.
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u/Necessary_Finding_32 Jun 18 '26
Where are you getting all this shit from? Post ww2 cultural rivalries? You're unhinged
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u/strawberry_semenade Jun 18 '26
And they called rubgy "rugger" because at the time, the rules of football had yet to be formalized and both version of the game were popular and so the term "football" was ambiguous. Even today, some English people call rugby "football", although most of the time they're referring to soccer.
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u/edgiepower Jun 18 '26
The half of Australia that follows rugby calls it footy.
The other half follow the real footy. Aussie rules footy.
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u/EnviousCipher Jun 18 '26
The half of Australia that follows rugby calls it footy.
Thats a bit generous to call it half of Australia when they can barely fill a 20k stadium and only two states genuinely participate with Victoria adding a single token team.
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u/Li_liminal_spaces Jun 18 '26 edited Jun 18 '26
In Ireland many still call it soccer because football is reserved for Gaelic football. We're shite at soccer though so it doesn't come up often. Still there is International Rules Football games between Irish and Austrailians which combines
footiefooty with gaelic.2
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Jun 18 '26
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u/edgiepower Jun 18 '26
I don't know the difference between rugabees, but I'm calling 'carn' about not seeing the difference between them and footy.
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u/TheArtistFKAMinty Jun 18 '26
"Football" is more like a class of sports than a singular sport. Calling any individual sport "football" is a synecdoche, but the most regionally popular variant usually gets called it:
Association Football (Soccer/Footy)
American Football (Gridiron)
Rugby Union Football
Rugby League Football
Australian Rules Football (Aussie Rules)
Gaelic Football/GAA
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u/spooneman1 Jun 18 '26
And if Americans insisted it was called 'Rugger' and called their league Major League Rugger, Brits would slag them about that too.
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u/NoDefaultForMe Jun 18 '26
Even today, some English people call rugby "football"
I have never once ever hear a fellow Englishmen ever refer to Rugby as soccer. Where are you getting this from lol.
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u/Necessary_Finding_32 Jun 18 '26
Even today, some English people call rugby "football",
Er, no. This is completely untrue
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u/BluetheNerd Jun 18 '26
Purely anecdotal but I've never once met a British person who calls rugby football.
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u/ScoochingCapuchin Jun 18 '26
I've never, and will never hear an English person refer to rugby as football
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u/strawberry_semenade Jun 18 '26
Both of the governing bodies of rugby in England have the word "football" in their names.
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u/Ok-Material-9134 Jun 18 '26
Some posh kids at boarding schools called it soccer and rugby rugger it wasnt exactly everyone in the UK
Working class people that built football into the global sport it is called it football and they 'won out'.
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u/joped99 Jun 18 '26
Same thing with Aluminum. Named so by a Brit, then renamed to Aluminium to sound more posh
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u/feetiedid Jun 18 '26
This is true. Although, I think it was to sound like all the other "iums," like sodium, plutonium, chromium, etc.
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u/Mr-Thursday Jun 18 '26
Also the chemist who discovered it originally tried calling it alumium.
Then when nobody liked his first name attempt, aluminum was attempt #2 and aluminium was attempt #3.
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u/Immolation_E Jun 18 '26
I believe the respelling to aluminium was by other orgs and not the person that discovered it.
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u/SOwED Jun 18 '26
And he called it that because of the mineral alum so alumium makes perfect sense.
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u/_raydeStar Jun 18 '26
Oh. I thought they just couldn't pronounce it easily.
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u/Ye_olde_oak_store Jun 18 '26
Our language changes things more than just adding ou into things like colour.
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u/xbpb124 Jun 18 '26 edited Jun 18 '26
Then they decided to never bring up Platinum or Molynbdnum ever* again.
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u/salazafromagraba Jun 18 '26
Not at all true but thanks for spreading disinformation.
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u/JJJBLKRose Jun 18 '26
According to Wikipedia, most elements at the time were named ending in -ium which apparently stems from latin. The guy who first starting writing about and isolating aluminum tried naming it alumium, which people apparently did not like because the 'alu' was derived from English. So he then named it Aluminum.
Later, people who were annoyed that it didn't end in 'ium' started using the 'aluminium' spelling and pronunciation.
So while not exactly to make it sound more posh, it was done because a few scientists didn't like that it didn't like the way it sounded because it wasn't traditional (though other elements were named with '-num' already by that time.
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u/Tehwi Jun 18 '26
Oi guv, 'ot a bi' of a ring to it innit, aluminium just loike the queen 'nd noble quiote posh innit
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u/Phyrexian_Overlord Jun 18 '26
For anyone that doesn't know, "football" meant any game played on foot, aka without a horse. Then most games got new names when the rules were fleshed out enough.
Soccer is a football game, football is a football game.
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u/fjelskaug Jun 18 '26
One was called Association Football and its shortened slang, Soccer, is still commonly used till this day.
The other was called Rugby Football, and the slang Rugger hasn't been historically prevalent.
Eventually one became more popular than the other in different places, and thus became the de-facto "Football", in UK this is Association Football, and in US this is Rugby Football.
Fun fact: Slangs that end with -er are called Oxford University slang, and here's a short list of other words including Soccer, Rugger, and even Footer https://www.oxfordhistory.org.uk/university/slang.html If you've heard Brits say "a tenner", this is also where it originated.
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u/xesaie Jun 18 '26
Gridiron/American Football and Rugby Football are pretty different traditions though - they've been diverged nearly as long as American Football and Association Football have been
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u/Dungarth Jun 18 '26
Handball is a football game!
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u/SOwED Jun 18 '26
Basketball is a football game!
Lacrosse is a football game!
Uhh...
Croquette is a football game!
Bocci is a football game!
Bowling is a football game!
Ball-in-a-cup is football game!
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Jun 18 '26
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u/ominousgraycat Jun 18 '26
I don't know why you were being downvoted. You're right about gridiron football. I haven't heard of "field football", but it wouldn't surprise me if that is a name for it. It fits.
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u/AlexanderLavender Jun 18 '26
American and Canadian football are the two types of gridiron football. The fields were originally painted with lines both ways making a grid
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u/Stormfly Jun 18 '26
Association Football
Gridiron Football (American and Canadian)
Rugby Football (Union and League)
Gaelic Football
Australian Rules Football
International Rules Football (a combination of Australian Rules and Gaelic Football)
There are so many for one to take the name.
I call it "Association Football" to both everyone sometimes.
"Are you guys watching the Association Football World Cup this year?"
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u/Greggs-the-bakers Jun 18 '26
Yeah.... no. Soccer was a name only used by posh cunts. The vast majority of working class only ever called it football.
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u/MokausiLietuviu Jun 18 '26
Nah, "soccer" always was a weird posh word in England, much like "rugger" is.
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u/sixty_years_of_hurt_ Jun 18 '26
Yep, it comes from association football
After learning that, I can't unhear some posh Eton twat back in the day
"I say, Archibald, old boy, fancy a game of rugger after the Royal Regatta'?
'Why, no, Cholmondley-Warner. I'm already devilishly exhausted from playing soccer last eve.'
Fack off
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u/Independent_Plum2166 Jun 18 '26
It’s more complicated than this.
You had Rugby Football (Rugger) and Associated Football (As-soc-ciated-> soc-cer).
But then we just shortened them to Rugby and Football. Probably because “Associated” would have sounded terrible.
It’s not our fault that America didn’t follow suit.
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u/XenomorphAlarm Jun 18 '26
why on earth would anyone else follow suit?
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u/Independent_Plum2166 Jun 18 '26
Because Soccer sounds dumb and like I showed has a dumb origin.
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u/Mr-Thursday Jun 18 '26 edited Jun 18 '26
Kind of.
Soccer came from posh Oxford students inventing a nickname for 'Association Football'. Meanwhile the British working class always preferred to just say 'football' and eventually their choice of words won out here and in most of the world.
America adopted the soccer term to differentiate it from Gridiron (American) football - AKA the one where they barely kick the ball and take breaks so often you end up with 10 minutes of game time surrounded by 60 minutes of ads
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u/DJ_naTia Jun 18 '26
To be fair, the original term for football likely has less to do with kicking a ball with your foot and more to do with the fact that it’s played on foot, as opposed to on horseback.
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u/AutomaticAccident Jun 18 '26
Kind of? That's exactly what happened.
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u/Mr-Thursday Jun 18 '26 edited Jun 18 '26
Saying Britain "switched back to football" isn't quite right.
Soccer was a nickname invented by the upper class (same kind of people that call rugby "rugger") - but most of the British population kept saying football/never used the word soccer so never had to switch back. Hence kind of.
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Jun 18 '26
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u/KingAnilingustheFirs Jun 18 '26
Kicking the football is a massive part of football. Every touchdown the kicker kicks for pat. Then the kick off. And then punt. And don't forget field goals. You have some teams were their leading scorer is the kicker. And these nfl kickers are incredible. The accuracy they have is insane. Put some respect on their names.
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u/feetiedid Jun 18 '26
Most American examples of the words the British make fun of are what the British brought to the US (then colonies) in the first place. When the colonies got their independence and the British left, this caused a split in the English dialects, spellings, and words. The United States English kept a lot of the older terms, while the British English developed differently in Europe. Even the current British accents are only about 200 or so years old. The American Southern drawls and Appalachian accents are largely from Britain. Imagine Shakespeare sounding a little more like someone from Kentucky. The Imperial Red Coats we see in movies should sound more like simple American Southern lawyers for accuracy. Only after they were two individual countries did the current posh British accent we know today differentiate from the accent originally brought to the Americas. The British started saying new words like "frying pan" and "autumn," while the Americans kept the old British words like "skillet" and "fall." Different dictionary writers established further differences. American dictionaries went with more Latin with "color" and "theater," while British authors kept their old Norman/French spellings of "colour" and "theatre." So, while the British might say "theatre" is "correct" English, it's also from their old enemies, the French.
And then there's football. That was a sport and activity played all over the world with no real established rules. One year, though, the British got together and made official rules under the Football Association authority. They called it "asoccer" or "soccer." In some places, football without rules evolved into more physical contests. When the official soccer rules were brought to the physical contact football places, it was so different, that it became a different sport. There was official Association Football and rugby football, which developed its own rules. In America, though, football and rugby developed into American football. It already had its own rules. When the Association Football rules were introduced, the Americans said, "We developed our own rules for football, based off of rugby football. We already call that football. But the rules you're telling us also sound fun. What did you call it? Association? Asoccer? Soccer? Yeah, we'll just call it that, the word you made up, so we won't get the two confused." Of course, as we know, the British dropped "asoccer" to simply call it football with the rest of the world. The Americas would have, but they already developed their own big brand of football.
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u/SweetButtsHellaBab Jun 18 '26
The American Southern drawls and Appalachian accents are largely from Britain. Imagine Shakespeare sounding a little more like someone from Kentucky.
Just like anything with a common ancestor, neither daughter are exactly like the mother. From what we can reconstruct, I would honestly say the closest modern accent is strong west country, which is an accent I would assume most Americans have never heard.
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u/Objective_Let_6385 Jun 18 '26
Yeah this, I was going to say something similar but you've put it into words much better than I could have
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u/feetiedid Jun 18 '26
The lyrical Welsh lilt?
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u/mads-80 Jun 18 '26
No, as in Bristol and its surrounds. Sounds like this. When linguists recreate Shakesperean English it sounds like an exaggerated version of that. It's similar to the accent fictional pirates speak with.
The Welsh accent is the result of English being a second language for the Welsh, and so they spoke with a cadence and phonation similar to their native language, and even many generations later when a lot of Welsh people don't actually speak Welsh, the accent that had been established still remains. A bit like how there are a lot of Indian people that primarily, or only, speak English, that speak it with a strong Indian accent that we associate with having learned it later in life despite having spoken it since birth, sometimes exclusively.
With that said, regional accents have been homogenising over the last century (since the inventions of radio and then film and television), and have changed a lot since the Industrial Revolution because of demographic shifts that have mostly consolidated what was intensely local accents into broader, regional ones.
For those reasons, all regional accents are a lot softer now than they used to be, and, in the time of Shakespeare, communities were a lot more insular so the differences in dialects from place to place were even bigger. So much so that there was a time when you could distinguish which exact part of London someone was from by their accent, because a couple of miles down the road was as accessible as Glasgow is from London today. So there was no singular "British accent" back then that you could compare to contemporary accents to say which is closest to "the original." There was a massive difference from one town to the next one over, and all were equally valid and equally British. Certain accents have changed less than others, like Devon or Somerset, and some have been introduced more recently and more intentionally, like RP English. But none were ever spoken universally or officially considered more correct than others.
Point is, linguists have pointed out aspects of older dialects of English that are in current use in parts of the US, but they're talking about individual phonemes, like the way you pronounce the letter R or the shape of a particular vowel. That does not mean you should imagine Shakespeare as "sounding like someone from Kentucky." An accent is the sum total of cadence, phonation, and how the vowels and consonants are formed, and American English is the result of a lot of influences mixed together. What they mean is that Shakespeare probably sounded like he was from the West Midlands (and he was), which has an accent that shares some similarities with Appalachian dialects that they don't share with certain modern accents like RP English. But in their totality they don't sound alike at all.
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u/F-Lambda Jun 18 '26
wait, fall is older than autumn?
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u/feetiedid Jun 18 '26
No. autumn came first, but that's irrelevant. The point was the term "fall" was started and used by the British in the Americas. They used both in the Americas. The British left the Americas and went back to mostly just autumn. But in the US, they kept saying fall (and autumn). The British might tease the US for saying fall, but the British introduced the word in the Americas in the first place.
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u/HotPotatoWithCheese Jun 18 '26
It was actually just the posh Oxford types that came up with that (they stick -er on the end of every sport. See: rugby>rugger). The working class of Victorian Britain called it football. So what the Americans really did was take a term that a very few privileged students thought sounded cool and ran with it. Pretty much everyone else calls it by the proper name and always have done.
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u/b1eadcb Jun 18 '26
We didn’t really take the word and run with it so much as that is what the sport was taught to us as.
Same with Australia, Canada, and other countries. They didn’t “run with it” they were just told this is what the sport is called
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u/Godshu Jun 18 '26
"Football" referred to over a dozen different sports where people kick a ball, Soccer always ever referred to one of them.
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u/SnooPears2409 Jun 18 '26
isnt it start from association football-> a ssoc er
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u/Ok-Material-9134 Jun 18 '26
Yes by posh boarding school kids.
Generally speaking the working class always called it football as they didn't really play rugby and so to them football was always football and there wasn't the confusion between sports.
The working classes built the sport into what it is today. As football began to dominate in the UK and there could be not confusion anymore between sports (and as posh/upper class had less and less influence in the sport) the use of the word soccer kept decreasing over time.
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u/HellbirdVT Jun 18 '26
A lot of "British vs American English" is like this.
The US is basically just a giant British diaspora, and like diasporas often do, they preserve the state of the home culture at the time they left.
Notably, after the US colonies separated, Britain had its single most significant rivalry period with the French since the Hundred Years War in the Napoleonic Wars. and the subsequent British dominance for 100 years until WW1, where a lot of English words with French origins and French pronouncations were altered to be less French.
So, for example, Americans pronounce "herb" with a silent H, just like in French, while the British emphasize the H in a more Germanic fashion.
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u/so_im_all_like Jun 18 '26
Old French had already lost the "h" sound from the Latin word and was spelling it "erbe". English borrowed it the word in the Middle Ages and writers subsequently reintroduced the written "h" to effectively re-Latinize the word (for the sake of literary prestige). This is also why we have the silent "b" in "debt".
The modern pronunciation of that "h" in "herb" among English speakers is a learned pronunciation due to that spelling, not something that existed originally. This is also mostly the case with the "t" in "often", though that is a native English word.
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u/TexasRoadhead Jun 18 '26
Several other countries like Ireland, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, etc... also say soccer but we don't hear about that shit
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u/CringyBoi42069 Jun 18 '26
Because none of those countries view themselves as the centre of the world
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u/TexasRoadhead Jun 18 '26
Yeah you're right, that means the word "soccer" is strictly an American thing as Brits make it out to be. That makes sense
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u/Maheemz Jun 18 '26
Soccer is short for association football, so was always still called football, Soccer just became the colloquialism Americans use, when everyone else still knew it as football
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u/g0ldiel0xx Jun 18 '26
Soccer was what the gentry called it, like Rugger for Rugby. ‘Association football’ shortened. The working class called it ‘football’ deeming ‘soccer’ to be an Americanisation, over time football became what everyone called it.
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Jun 18 '26
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u/Flameball202 Jun 18 '26
Technically speaking the way the US says it is the second way, and the UK says it the third way, Sir Davey originally called it "Alumium", which then became "Aluminum" then "Aluminium"
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u/GenGaara25 Jun 18 '26
And Alumium predates both and was the original choice by the discoverer. Then the mainland Europeans came up with Aluminium, while the original discoverer switched to Aluminum.
And that America only switched to Aluminum around 1900. Before that, Aluminium was the more common spelling stateside.
It was because Webster, in the 1830s, only included that Aluminum spelling in his dictionary (rather than both as most dictionaries did) so it gradually took hold among the general population. It just took 70 years to fully take over.
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Jun 18 '26
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u/TheEasySqueezy Jun 19 '26
It was definitely an upper class thing, probably why it traveled so far, the upper class could afford to go to the US and mingle whereas the rest couldn’t.
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u/SheevBot Jun 18 '26 edited Jun 18 '26
Thanks for providing a source!