Why Is Golf Called Golf?

Why Is golf called golf? Many have suggested that they called it golf because all the other four letter words had been taken. But golf has not always been a four-letter word. 

When language was overwhelmingly a spoken construct, as not many people could read and write, words existed more as sounds than as sets of letters. When scribes sought to render these sounds, there were differences as to how a word would be spelled out until dictionaries gave rise to a standardisation in spelling. 

Thus there are written references to gof, goff, goif, goiff, golf, gouff, gowf and gowfe. Indeed, Loudoun in Galston in Scotland, a club which was founded as recently as 1908, calls itself Loudoun Gowf Club. This spelling was employed because as its course was laid out over the Gowf Field of the Loudoun family, where the game had been played since the 16th century.

The name golf is generally held to have come from the Scots goulf, gowf, golf, golfand or golfing, which mean either to strike, cuff or propel forwards violently.

However there is another strain of thought that the name came from the Dutch kolf, or colf, or kolv, which means club. The Dutch had a game, kolven, involving hitting a leather-clad ball with a club probably more akin to a mallet than something we would recognise as a prototype golf club. The theory is based on the idea that, through the maritime trade between the two countries, the Dutch sailors brought the game to Scotland.

But the history of the game of golf in Scotland, it has been argued, pre-dates that of the Dutch game. A Scottish Act of Parliament enacted in 1457 banned pastimes that took the population away from their archery practice which could be handy for the defence of the realm. The Act decreed that “The fut bal ande the golf be vtterly cryt downe and nocht vsyt.” (“The football and the golf be utterly cried down and not used.”) This suggests that the game had become at least relatively widespread by then in Scotland.

The Dutch theory has also fallen out of favour because, in all its various early spellings, the name of the sport in Scotland has always started with a 'g', not a 'c' or 'k'. The Oxford English Dictionary certainly has rejected this theory as “none of the Dutch games have been convincingly identified with golf, nor is it certain that kolf was ever used to denote the game as well as the implement.”