There are many terms used to describe association football, the sport most commonly referred to in the English-speaking world as "football" or "soccer". Background The rules of Association football were codified in England by the Football Association in 1863. The alternative name soccer was first coined in late 19th century England to help distinguish between several codes of football that were growing in popularity at that time, in particular rugby football. The word soccer is an abbreviation of association (from assoc.) and first appeared in English Public Schools and universities in the 1880s (sometimes using the variant spelling "socker") where it retains some popularity of use to this day. The word is sometimes credited to Charles Wreford-Brown, an Oxford University student said to have been fond of shortened forms such as brekkers for breakfast and rugger for rugby football (see Oxford -er). However, the attribution to Wreford-Brown in particular is generally considered to be spurious. Clive Toye noted "they took the third, fourth and fifth letters of Association and called it SOCcer." The sport's full name Association football has never been widely used, although in Britain some clubs in rugby football strongholds adopted the suffix Association Football Club (A.F.C.) to avoid confusion with the dominant sport in their area, and FIFA, the world governing body for the sport, is a French-language acronym of "Fédération Internationale de Football Association" – the International Federation of Association Football. "Soccer football" is used less often than it once was: the United States Soccer Federation was known as the United States Soccer Football Association from 1945 until 1974, when it adopted its current name; and the Canadian Soccer Association was known as the Canadian Soccer Football Association from 1958 to 1971. Transition away from soccer For nearly a hundred years after it was first coined, soccer was used as an uncontroversial alternative in Britain to football, often in colloquial and juvenile contexts, but was also widely used in formal speech and in writing about the game. "Soccer" was a term used by the upper class whereas the working and middle classes preferred the word "football"; as the upper class lost influence in British society from the 1960s on, "football" supplanted "soccer" as the most commonly used and accepted word. There is evidence that the use of soccer is declining in Britain and is now considered (albeit incorrectly, due to the word's British origin) to be