goal: [16] The earliest examples of what can confidently be identified as the word goal come from the first half of the 16th century, when it was used for both the ‘finishing line of a race’ and the ‘posts through which the ball is sent in football’. Before that we are in the realm of speculation. A 14th-century text from Kent has the word gol ‘boundary’, which could quite plausibly be the ancestor of the 16th-century goal, and gol suggest an Old English *gāl.
No such word has come down to us, but the Old English verb gǣlan ‘hinder’, which looks as though it could have been related to a noun *gāl, indicates that if it existed it might have meant ‘obstacle, barrier’ (which would lead on quite logically through ‘boundary’ and ‘finishing line’ to ‘something to be aimed at’).
