August 2005
Talking about Words
With Prof. Richard W. Bailey
Woot!
 An on-line dictionary invites readers to create their own entries for brand-new words, and a pretty new word has drawn my attention: Woot!
That’s an exclamation. One example sentence is: " Woot! I owned that dude!" Defining the word, Don Wilson writes: "A shout of excitement from a geek, nerd, and/or dork within the internet" (April 2, 2003). Another definer gives as her example sentence: " Woot! I got an A on this test."
All of us with even the least instruction in grammar learned that there are "parts of speech," including nouns, adjectives, adverbs, verbs, conjunctions, prepositions, pronouns and so on. However long the list of these parts (usually there are from seven to 10 in the schoolbooks), it always concludes with interjections&mdash a miscellaneous collection of things including exclamations like oh! or ho! or Oh ho!
 Woot!, in the example sentences, is an interjection, and like a lot of interjections it is punctuated with an exclamation point. The American Heritage Dictionary (3 rd ed.) labels 237 words as interjections, among them (exclamation points omitted): ahem, avast, bully, gee whiz, hoiks, lackaday, tsk and yoiks.
The Oxford English Dictionary has 463 including such Briticisms as blimey and hey nonny nonny (cf. American English hot cha).
Merriam-Webster gets along with just 21 but gives nice entries for fiddle- faddle and tarnation. It has a separate category for exclamations, including hail and whew.
The online lexicographers have proposed various etymologies for Woot! Some of them think it is a blend word combining "Wow loot!" (or maybe "Wonderful Loot") from the fantasy game Dungeons and Dragons. Others imagine that it is an acronym for "We owned the other team." "Waste of time" or "Way out of Topic." Still others derive it from a lisping pronunciation of Root!, a triumphal exclamation supposed to be used by hackers who penetrate the root directory of an unsecured computer.
Interjections are the neglected step-children of grammar. A big new grammar book—nearly 1,200 pages long—devotes only half a dozen pages to them. A 300-page abridgment of this grammar doesn’t mention them at all.
Yet think of how much conversational freight is carried by these words. If you whisper Hey! to a newborn child, it sounds one way. If you shout Hey! as a thief drives away your car, it sounds another. They are important words, and the grammar should explain how they work.
Interjections are, of course, very frequent in conversation, particularly if we extend the category to the stand-alone words like Yeah! or No!. A good old free-standing one is Scottish Hoot! (or sometimes Hoots!); that one dates back to 1540.
As the dictionaries show, there are a lot of potential interjections, and a lot of them are rarely used, like Gadzooks! or Ooh-la-la! In fact, they are in the dictionary mainly because they are unfamiliar, though likely to turn up in literature. (The OED gives the former from Charles Dickens and the latter from S. J. Perelman.)
The big databases now used in preparing grammars and dictionaries reveal all sorts of wonderful things, including news about interjections. Oh! is the most common one in both British and American English. Americans are more likely to use Wow! and Hi!; Britons prefer Ah! and Hello!. If you’re an American, you get more information by saying Huh?; Brits are more likely to get amplification or repetition by saying Eh?
Americans are more likely to say Thank you than the British. The British are more likely to use Please and Sorry.
Merriam-Webster invited visitors to its website to propose candidates for the " Top Ten Favorite Words (Not in the Dictionary)." Woot! came in third, and it is the only interjection in the top 10.
Woot! seems here to stay, at least for a while, before it goes into the archive of the obsolescent along with Socko!, Geewhillikins!and Jumping Jehoshaphat!
Richard W. Bailey is the Fred Newton Scott Collegiate Professor of English. His most recent book is Rogue Scholar: The Sinister Life and Celebrated Death of Edward H. Rulloff, University of Michigan Press, 2003—a biography of an American thief, impostor, murderer and would-be philologist who lived from 1821 to 1871. It was published by the University of Michigan Press in 2003.
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