Oxford "-er"

The Oxford "-er", or often "-ers", is a colloquial and sometimes facetious suffix prevalent at Oxford University from about 1875, which is thought to have been borrowed from the slang of Rugby School. The term was defined by the lexicographer Eric Partridge in his Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (several editions 1937–61).

The "-er" gave rise to such words as rugger for Rugby football, soccer (or the rarer togger) and the now archaic footer was used for either game (but more usually soccer).

The term "soccer", derived from a transformation/emendation of the "assoc" in Association football, was popularised by a prominent English footballer, Charles Wreford-Brown (1866–1951). The first recorded use of "soccer" was in 1895 (or even earlier in 1892). Two years earlier The Western Gazette reported that "W. Neilson was elected captain of ‘rugger’ and T. N. Perkins of ‘socker’" and Henry Watson Fowler recommended socker in preference to "soccer" to emphasise its correct pronunciation (i.e. hard "cc/ck"). In this context, he suggested that "baccy", because of the "cc" in "tobacco", was "more acceptable than soccer" (there being no "cc" in "Association"). "Socker" was the form that appeared in the first edition of the Concise Oxford Dictionary (1911).

The sports writer E. W. Swanton, who joined the London Evening Standard in 1927, recalled that "Rugby football ... in those days, I think, was never called anything but rugger unless it were just football". Around the same time the Conservative Minister Leo Amery noted that, for his thirteen-year-old son Jack, "footer in the rain [was] a very real grievance" at Harrow School.

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