The word "hooligan" first appears in print in the summer of 1898, in London newspaper reports of street disorder around the bank holiday of August. By autumn it was being used everywhere, with no one entirely sure where it had come from.
Three Possible Origins
Several explanations were proposed at the time, and lexicographers still argue about which is right:
- An Irish family named Houlihan (or Hooligan) said to be notorious for rowdiness in Southwark, south London.
- A music-hall song popular in the 1890s about a fictional Irish family called the Hooligans, whose every member was a drunk or a brawler.
- A comic-strip family drawn in the same period in popular London newspapers, also called the Hooligans, who got into elaborate trouble each week.
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The three may not be in real conflict. Music-hall songs, comic strips, and rumoured-of real families fed each other in late Victorian London, and a single notorious surname could have surfaced in all three at once. The result was that the name was suddenly available to journalists looking for a label for any group of rowdy young men.
A Press Panic
The summer of 1898 saw a moral panic about gangs of working-class youths in London, fuelled by sensational newspaper coverage. "Hooligans" became the catch-all term, and within months it had spread to other English-speaking countries. By 1900, "hooliganism" was a settled noun. The Russian language borrowed the word, with no change of spelling, around 1905; modern Russian still uses it for any kind of unruly public behaviour.
Football Hooliganism
The most famous modern use of the word is in the phrase "football hooliganism," referring specifically to violence and disorder around English football matches in the 1970s and 1980s. The original London street gangs of 1898 would not have recognised the football connection — the modern game was barely a generation old at the time — but the word was right there, waiting, when journalists needed a label for the new phenomenon.