It comes up in football quite often in the 1950s, 60s, and through the present.
What I thought was interesting is this question of when did it make the switch from football to mainstream?
Many times when we have these sort of synonym pairs,
we often have one word that comes essentially from a Latin etymology and one word that comes from an old English etymology.
Coming up on Word Matters, we tackle a listener question and explain inexplicable.
I'm Emily Brewster and Word Matters is produced by Merriam-Webster in collaboration with New England Public Media.
On each episode, Merriam-Webster editors Amon Shea,
Peter Sokolowski and I explore some aspect of the English language from the dictionary's vantage point.
My podcast partners and I were all ready to discuss some fascinating language matters when circumstances required that I call an audible and set out a couple episodes.
Happily, Amon and Peter were more than adequately prepared to answer a listener question,
this time about the word audible itself.
A listener wrote in with a question about audible, the word, wrote that a pair of podcasts,
they listened to use the term audible to mean a replacement and explained that.
A curse research showed that audible is a sports term from American football with that replacement meeting.
They thought, however,
it was very interesting to see it used in an audio medium where audible does in fact have a related association with the business and a business that's a not infrequent sponsor for podcasts.
And they initially thought that it might have been an ad for Audible,
the podcast company, and suspected that this term would slip into obscurity given the confusion.
And I guess wanted to know if Audible, as a synonym for a replacement,
was so readily understood outside of its sports context.