A word now used around the world for violent troublemakers started as a joke name in cheap London entertainment.

In the 1880s and 1890s, Houlihan and its variants were stock comic Irish surnames. They turned up in music-hall songs and in the popular papers. Etymonline says hooligan "almost certainly" comes from this source. The Compact Oxford English Dictionary, as quoted on Wikipedia, points to a rowdy Irish family in a music-hall song of the 1890s.

A letter in Notes and Queries on October 15, 1898, adds a clue. It described "Hooligan" as an Irish character in the comic journal Nuggets. He appeared weekly opposite a German character called Schneider, in a feature that had run "for four or five years."

The word moved from comedy to crime reports. Merriam-Webster and Wikipedia date the first known use to 1894, when London police courts heard of "the Hooligan Boys" of Lambeth. The big jump came in the summer of 1898. After a murder in South London by a gang member, newspapers filled with talk of "Hooliganism." On August 22, 1898, The Daily Graphic described "the avalanche of brutality" going under that name.

There is a rival story, and it has a real man in it. Clarence Rook's 1899 book The Hooligan Nights credited the word to one Patrick Hooligan. Rook said he "gave laws and a name to his followers" in south London. Etymonline notes that a Patrick Hooligan, born in 1862, was convicted of theft in 1897. Merriam-Webster still gives him as a "perhaps." But nobody has shown that this man inspired the word, and the comic-song family has the stronger evidence.

Some modern theories are weaker still. A 2015 BBC Scotland program suggested the word came from a Scots Gaelic word for midge, misheard by General Wade in the 1740s. Wikipedia calls this possibly apocryphal. Another theory links it to the Mongol ruler Hulagu Khan. The etymologist Anatoly Liberman notes there is "not a trace" of the word in any book between the 13th century and the late 1890s.

The word then traveled well beyond London. In the 20th century it entered Russian as khuligan. In Soviet usage it was applied to scofflaws, political dissenters and people charged with public misconduct.