Super Bowls, Balls, Boles, and Bulls

Tomorrow is the Super Bowl, so of course I've been wondering not primarily about which team will win, but about the origin of the term itself. (See also my post on Super Tuesday from 2012). Why is the Super Bowl called the Super Bowl? It hearkens back to College Bowl games, and first and foremost the Rose Bowl in Pasadena. The Rose Bowl's name and shape were inspired, in turn, by the very first bowl-shaped college stadium, the Yale Bowl in New Haven, CT.

But the association between bowls and balls comes not only from the shape of football stadiums in which oddly-shaped balls are tossed around. In fact, "bowl" and "ball" come from the same root.

Take bowling, for example. Bowling got its name from bowls, a 15th century game played with wooden balls; bowl was another word for ball and the verb "to bowl" was derived from the noun. Incidentally, this is the origin of the phrase "to bowl over," originally, to physically knock someone over with a ball. The word "bowl" for "ball" derives from the Old French "bole," (boule in modern French; even English speakers might enjoy buying bread whose shape is described using that word).

The french bole (or boule) derives in turn from the latin "bulla," "a round swelling or knob." Because the seals used to seal documents were (I suppose) round and knob like, a sealed document began to be called a "bulla" as well, whence the papal bull, an official communication by the pope.

Whether bull, bowl, bole, or ball, these words, all describing various kind of round, rounded, or swollen things, derive from a Proto Indo-European root meaning "to blow, inflate, or swell." This very productive root also spawned a whole slew of other words, including belly, billow, bellow, pillow, and, of course, phallus.