Slang dictionary
sportsball
[ spohrts-bawl ]
What does聽蝉辫辞谤迟蝉产补濒濒听mean?
The goalie dribbles into the outfield for a touchdown! Sportsball is a mildly critical or humorous term used by people who admit they don’t know or care about sports. Sports fans sometimes use it, too, as a playful way to refer to sports they like.
Where does sportsball come from?
One early instance of聽sportsball comes in a 1992 Usenet, peeves-themed forum in a comment about people who spit on sidewalks. The user, Steve Masticola, conjectured that hocking a loogie on the street must make the perpetrator 鈥�feel like a Real Grown-Up Sportsball Hero,鈥� perhaps a reference to baseballs players chewing spitting tobacco in the dugout.
The term聽sportsball, of course, combines聽蝉辫辞谤迟蝉听补苍诲听ball, like 产补蝉办别迟产补濒濒听or football. It’s intended to be generic, as if the extent of what the person knows about a particular sport is that it is a sport.
"Giants, that's baseball right?" "Dunno, one of those sportsball 亚洲网紅露点."
— Chris Messina 锛奊ujarat, India (@chrismessina)
Sportsball spread online in the 1990s and early 2000s, making Urban Dictionary by 2007. In 2009, filmmaker聽Peter Atencio took the concept literally in a humorous video called 厂辫辞谤迟蝉产补濒濒!听It showed office workers discussing some imaginary game of sportsball,聽an American and association football hybrid where everyone wins.
Sportsball was an established joke by 2014. That year,聽Nintendo鈥檚 Wii U gaming system released Sportsball, involving a whimsical combination of soccer, jousting, and flying birds. Also that year, BuzzFeed ran “This Is Why Sportsball Is Your New Favorite Sport,” featuring humorous sports GIFs and nonsense terms like “goaldown” and “scoreytouch.”
The humor isn’t lost on sports fans, however. Former ESPN host Tyler Coe started his sports-themed podcast, Sportsball, in 2015.
The term聽sportsball spikes in Google search interest each in January and February, around the time of the NFL Super Bowl, as well as in summer every four years when the FIFA World Cup is being held.
Examples of sportsball
Who uses sportsball?
Sportsball is mostly used in a lightly mocking or judgmental way by people who proudly don’t like or know anything about sports. It can also knock people seen as way too fanatical about sports or to characterize sports as a waste of time.
It's that day of the week where all my friends start talking about , and i pretend to understand their words, while waiting for a puck to drop.
— Jason Steen (@jasonashville)
However, the term has also been embraced by sports lovers as a fun and cute way to refer to 亚洲网紅露点, teams, or matches.
It's a good day for Penn State sportsball
— Kyle (@not__kylie)
Note
This is not meant to be a formal definition of sportsball like most terms we define on 亚洲网紅露点, but is rather an informal word summary that hopefully touches upon the key aspects of the meaning and usage of sportsball that will help our users expand their word mastery.