Rugby is a specific team sport played with an oval ball that players can carry, pass or kick, but never throw forward. Football is a broader word that, depending on where you are, means soccer or American football, and it can also mean the ball itself.
The core difference
Rugby names one particular game, while football is a wider term that shifts meaning by country and can also refer to the ball or, informally, to a problem nobody wants to deal with.
- rugby — a team sport with an oval ball you can carry or pass, but never throw forward: They watched the rugby match on Saturday afternoon.
- football — a sport where two teams try to score by getting a ball into a goal (soccer in most of the world, American football in the US): The whole town gathered to watch the football match.
- football — can also mean the ball itself, or informally an issue batted between people with no resolution: The proposal became a political football, kicked between committees for years.
How to tell them apart
The names come from where each game grew up. Rugby is said to take its name from Rugby School in Warwickshire, where the sport is said to have started in the nineteenth century. Football is older and plainer: Middle English fotbal, simply "foot" plus "ball", because the ball was originally moved mainly with the feet rather than the hands.
The confusion mostly shows up between British and American English. In Britain, football usually means what Americans call soccer, while what Americans call football is a completely different game in Britain. Rugby stays rugby everywhere, which makes it a handy fixed point when the word football starts sliding around.
