Why Is the Super Bowl Called the Super Bowl?

The Los Angeles Rams take on the Cincinnati Bengals during Super Bowl LVI on Sunday, but why do we call it the Super Bowl?

The 2022 Super Bowl will take place in the SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California, the home of the Rams, making it the second year in a row that it's held in the home stadium of one of the teams. The coveted halftime show slot will be filled by hip hop artists Dr. Dre, Eminem, Snoop Dogg, Mary J. Blige and Kendrick Lamar.

This year's event will be the 56th annual Super Bowl and will be watched worldwide by millions of viewers. The event wasn't always called the Super Bowl though, and it had a far less catchier name when it was invented in the 1960s.

Etymology of Super Bowl

The first Super Bowl was held in 1967 at a time when there were two rival football leagues in America—the NFL and the American Football League. As part of their merger agreement, that season's best teams competed in what was called the AFL-NFL World Championship Game.

That name stuck until the term Super Bowl was used for the first time in 1969's Super Bowl III. Played out at the Orange Bowl in Miami, Joe Namath and the New York Jets beat the Baltimore Colts 16-7.

Businessman Lamar Hunt and prime founder of the American Football League is credited with giving the Super Bowl its name, though he claims it was a simple mispronunciation that stuck.

After Hunt died at the age of 74 in 2006, a New York Times profile revealed the conversation that gave the Super Bowl its name.

Recalling the discussions of playoff games, Hunt said: "The words flowed something like this: 'No, not those games—the one I mean is the final game. You know, the Super Bowl.'

"My own feeling is that it probably registered in my head because my daughter, Sharron, and my son Lamar Jr. had a children's toy called a Super Ball," he added. "And I probably interchanged the phonetics of 'bowl' and 'ball.'"

So the third matchup between AFL and NFL teams became known as the Super Bowl for the first time, but it was also Hunt's idea to represent each game with Roman numerals. In a note sent to NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle, Hunt claimed the use of numerals instead of numbers would give the Super Bowl "more dignity" and the tradition has stuck ever since.

As well as being a founder of the AFL, Hunt was the owner of the Kansas City Chiefs from 1960 until his death in 2006. He also owned a number of American-based soccer clubs.

Super Bowl LVI will take place on Sunday, February 13, and airs at 6:30 p.m. ET on NBC.