DCHP-1 Online

rugby-football

• n. a distinctive Canadian variety of football developed in the late nineteenth century from English rugby or rugger.

  See also: football  

  • Rugby football, often rugby at the popular level, has, except among some older Canadians, gradually been displaced since the 1930's by the characteristically American term football, the Canadianism being confined largely to official league titles.

  • 1910  (1965)  Smirle Lawson will not play half-back . . . on the Toronto University rugby-football team this fall.
  • 1924  The hungry and infuriated class of cannibals would fall upon him like a mob of Rugby football players.
  • 1958  . . . the groups chiefly interested . . . are . . . the junior rugby football league. . . .