Word.ws English Dictionary

beautiful game

beautiful game noun: association football; soccer.

Noun

the beautiful game

  1. (capitalized, sometimes) Association football; soccer.
    • After watching Saturday's final, don't you agree that soccer is still the beautiful game that Pelé called it?1990 December 18, Fauzi Omar, “Cheers to Kedah But Not At All to Fifa”, in New Straits Times, Malaysia, page 32
    • Amid all the fevered anticipation of this fixture, few would have expected to witness an aesthetically pleasing example of the beautiful game.2014 November 14, Stephen Halliday, “Scotland 1-0 Republic of Ireland: Maloney the hero”, in The Scotsman
  2. (Canada) Ice hockey.

Origin of beautiful game

Calque of Portuguese jogo bonito.

Questions about beautiful game

What does beautiful game mean?
Beautiful game means association football; soccer.
What part of speech is beautiful game?
Beautiful game is a noun.

Words near beautiful game in the dictionary

  1. beautiful armadillo
  2. beautiful armadillos
  3. beautiful era
  4. beautiful fruit dove
  5. beautiful fruit doves
  6. beautiful game
  7. beautiful music
  8. beautiful people
  9. beautifuler
  10. beautifulest
  11. beautifull

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: beautiful game (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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