• yahoo •
Printable Version Pronunciation: yah-hu • Hear it!
Part of Speech: Noun, Interjection
Meaning: 1. [Noun] A clod, bumpkin, hick, klutz, lout, rube or philistine. A clumsy, unsophisticated person without much learning. 2. [Interjection] A cry of happy excitement or exultation, as in Yahoo! I won the lottery!
Notes: The founders of the Yahoo!® search engine apparently neglected to read Gulliver's Travels before picking a name for their company or they might have chosen a less ambiguous one, say, Geronimo!. The noun, yahoo, is an old word for an uneducated dirt farmer. Now that farmers are as well-educated as the rest of us, the name applies to any clumsy bumpkin, from the country, city, or points in between. Yahooism "acting like a yahoo" has been tried, as well as yahoodom "all yahoos taken together". Use them at your own risk.
In Play: This Good Word is still used most widely in reference to someone lacking a penchant for clear thinking: "Some yahoo from the Flat Earth Society wants equal time in our geography class." When the request was turned down, the same young fellow shouted, "Yahoo! I hate being in school, anyhow!"
Word History: Today we offer another alphaDictionary two-for-one sale (two words for the price of none), for the noun yahoo and the interjection are entirely different words. The noun first appeared in Jonathan Swift's novel Gulliver's Travels in 1726. Yahoos in that novel were degraded humanoids used as beasts of burden by the Houyhnhnms, a race of rational horses (from which our notion of "horse-sense" probably derives). The interjection would seem to be a variant of yoo-hoo or yo-ho, masculinized by cowboys who used it in herding cattle. (Yahoo! Karon Johnson sent us a wonderful word to play with today!)
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