Other uses
Look up yo (greeting) in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
- In Baltimore, and possibly other cities, yo (or a word coincidentally identical to it) has become a gender-neutral pronoun. [9]
Yo ( /joʊ/ YOH) is a slang interjection, [1] commonly associated with North American English. It was popularized by the Italian-American community in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in the 1940s. [2]
Although often used as a greeting and often deployed at the beginning of a sentence, yo may also come at the end of a sentence and/or may be used to place emphasis on or to direct focus onto a particular individual, group, or issue at hand, or to gain the attention of another individual or group. It may also be used to express excitement, surprise, disbelief, enthusiasm, anger, or amazement.
The interjection yo was first used in Middle English. [3] [4] In addition to yo, it was also sometimes written io. [5]
Though the term may have been in use in an isolated manner in different contexts earlier in English, its current usage and popularity derives from its use in Philadelphia's Italian American population in the twentieth century, which spread to other ethnic groups in the city, notably among Philadelphia African Americans, and later spread beyond Philadelphia. [6]
From the late twentieth century, it frequently appeared in hip hop music and became associated with African American Vernacular English, as seen in the title Yo! MTV Raps , a popular American television hip-hop music program in the late 1980s.
A frequent example of the expression is fictional Philadelphian Italian-American Rocky Balboa, where the word is used throughout all of the Rocky films and is part of the iconic line, "Yo, Adrian, I did it!", which was ranked 80th in the AFI's list of 100 best movie quotes. [7]
The phrase "Yo, Blair. What are you doing?" was supposedly an informal greeting that United States President George W. Bush gave to British prime minister Tony Blair during the G8 summit in Saint Petersburg, Russia, on July 17, 2006. However, other sources state that Bush’s usage of the word "yo" is a “myth” and that the president actually said "Yeah, Blair". [8]
An eponym is a person, a place, or a thing after whom or which someone or something is, or is believed to be, named. The adjectives which are derived from the word eponym include eponymous and eponymic.
Pussy is a term used as a noun, an adjective, and—in rare instances—a verb in the English language. It has several meanings, as slang, as euphemism, and as vulgarity. Most commonly, it is used as a noun with the meaning "cat", "coward", or "weakling". In slang usage, it can mean "vulva or vagina" and less commonly, as a form of synecdoche, meaning "sexual intercourse with a woman". Because of its multiple senses including both innocent and vulgar connotations, pussy is often the subject of double entendre.
Merriam-Webster, Incorporated is an American company that publishes reference books and is mostly known for its dictionaries. It is the oldest dictionary publisher in the United States.
A shiv, also chiv, schiv, shivvie, or shank, is a handcrafted bladed-weapon resembling a knife that is commonly associated with prison inmates.
Folk etymology – also known as (generative) popular etymology, analogical reformation, (morphological)reanalysis and etymological reinterpretation – is a change in a word or phrase resulting from the replacement of an unfamiliar form by a more familiar one through popular usage. The form or the meaning of an archaic, foreign, or otherwise unfamiliar word is reinterpreted as resembling more familiar words or morphemes.
The word orange is a noun and an adjective in the English language. In both cases, it refers primarily to the orange fruit and the color orange, but has many other derivative meanings.
A humbug is a person or object that behaves in a deceptive or dishonest way, often as a hoax or in jest. The term was first described in 1751 as student slang, and recorded in 1840 as a "nautical phrase". It is now also often used as an exclamation to describe something as hypocritical nonsense or gibberish.
Despite the various English dialects spoken from country to country and within different regions of the same country, there are only slight regional variations in English orthography, the two most notable variations being British and American spelling. Many of the differences between American and British/Commonwealth English date back to a time before spelling standards were developed. For instance, some spellings seen as "American" today were once commonly used in Britain, and some spellings seen as "British" were once commonly used in the United States.
A bogle, boggle, or bogill is a Northumbrian and Scots term for a ghost or folkloric being, used for a variety of related folkloric creatures including Shellycoats, Barghests, Brags, the Hedley Kow and even giants such as those associated with Cobb's Causeway. They are reputed to live for the simple purpose of perplexing mankind, rather than seriously harming or serving them.
Irregardless is a word sometimes used in place of regardless or irrespective, which has caused controversy since the early twentieth century, though the word appeared in print as early as 1795.
People from the United States of America are known as and refer to themselves as Americans. Different languages use different terms for citizens of the United States. All forms of English refer to US citizens as Americans, a term deriving from the United States of America, the country's official name. In the English context, it came to refer to inhabitants of British America, and then the United States. There is some linguistic ambiguity over this use due to the other senses of the word American, which can also refer to people from the Americas in general. Other languages, including French, Japanese, and Russian, use cognates of American to refer to people from the United States, while others, particularly Spanish and Portuguese, primarily use terms derived from United States or North America. There are various other local and colloquial names for Americans. The name America came from the Italian navigator Amerigo Vespucci.
In grammar, an adverbial genitive is a noun declined in the genitive case that functions as an adverb.
Hello is a salutation or greeting in the English language. It is first attested in writing from 1826.
The term w00t, or woot, is a slang interjection used to express happiness or excitement, usually used in online conversation. The expression is most popular on forums, Usenet posts, multiplayer computer games, IRC chats, and instant messages, though use in webpages of the World Wide Web is by no means uncommon. The w00t spelling is a leetspeak variant of woot; alternative spellings include whoot, wOOt, wh00t, wewt, wought, etc.
Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage (MWDEU) is a usage dictionary published by Merriam-Webster, Inc., of Springfield, Massachusetts. It is currently available in a reprint edition (1994) ISBN 0-87779-132-5 or ISBN 978-0-87779-132-4.
The word data is most often used as a singular mass noun in educated everyday usage. However, due to the history and etymology of the word, considerable controversy has existed on whether it should be considered a mass noun used with verbs conjugated in the singular, or should be treated as the plural of the now-rarely-used datum.
As a historical colony of the United States, the Philippine English lexicon shares most of its vocabulary from American English, but also has loanwords from native languages and Spanish, as well as some usages, coinages, and slang peculiar to the Philippines. Some Philippine English usages are borrowed from or shared with British or Commonwealth English, for various reasons. Due to the influence of the Spanish language, Philippine English also contains Spanish-derived terms, including Anglicizations, some resulting in false friends, such as "salvage". Philippine English also borrowed words from Philippine languages, especially native plant and animal names, and cultural concepts with no exact English equivalents ; some borrowings from Philippine languages have entered mainstream English, such as abaca and ylang-ylang.
Slay is a slang colloquialism that possibly originated during the 1600s, but gained its current LGBT connotation in the 1970s from ball culture. Originally having a meaning similar to "that joke was killer", slay has since gained a definition meaning being impressed or term of agreement.