05 January 2014

The spelling of "whoa"

“Whoa” is hardly a new word; it dates back to at least the early 17th century. At that time it was used mostly in shouted form and was intended to garner the attention of someone in the distance. Around the mid-1800s, people began using “whoa” to halt forward-moving horses, and by the latter half of the 20th century it had morphed into an expression for conveying alarm, surprise or advanced interest...

Yet a simple Google search for “woah” brings up more than 5 million hits... But where “woah” with the “h” at the end has really blown up is on social media. Typing the hashtag “woah” into the search box on Twitter at any given moment results in something on the order of 50 tweets an hour. Remove the number sign from the front of “woah” and the result is more like 50 tweets a minute. (“Woah he got pushed,” “Woah, where did my highlighter go?” and “WOAH! Heat wave! 34 degrees!”)...

But wait. It appears there are even more ways to spell whoa. Some people feel the need to add an extra “h.” That’s right, “whoah.”
From The Good Word blog at Slate.  I know by posting this I'll be accused of being a linguistic prescriptivist by some readers, but I think it's interesting.

12 comments:

  1. I spell it "whoa" and obviously feel that it's the correct spelling. "Woah" to me seems like a misspelling, and it grates at me to see it becoming more prevalent. One can argue that just because more and more people are spelling it "woah", that doesn't make it right, but because our language is so fluid and dynamic, it most likely will (or already has) become an acceptable (or perhaps even the most common) spelling.

    What the Slate article fails to mention and what I can't readily find on the internet is how recently "woah" began appearing. Has it always been around as an alternate (albeit unrecognized by Merriam Webster) spelling? Or is it something that has appeared more recently, most likely as an intentional or unintentional variation on the older and more accepted "whoa?"

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    1. I feel exactly the same way. I personally started seeing "woah" as a teenager just getting into the Internet...this was around 1999-2000, I think. A few of my online friends (also teenagers) tended to say it. At first, I thought it was a typo, but they kept doing it, even when all other words were correct. Over time, I started seeing it more and more all over the web, along with other spelling oddities. I know we all have those few words that we tend to screw up (especially in a hurry), but I do wonder if misspellings are spreading like memes nowadays. Eeep!

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    2. I was able to find usage stats for both words appearing in books as far back as the 1800s on Google Ngram. Whoa is used almost exclusively until the 2000s. If you click on the year links below the graph, you can see the books and passages/references to woah. http://tinyurl.com/ka5o43z

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    3. Of course, after I published that comment it occurred to me I should expand the date range. So, for published works in English, it looks like whoa existed for about a century before woah. The earliest reference I could see for woah is 1825. http://tinyurl.com/o8qu86e

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  2. Woah is how Snowy barks in the English version of Herge's Tintin books

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  3. Maybe it's like "pwned", a typo that caught on. I doubt it, though. If people can't distinguish between your and you're, to, too, and two, it's and its, their, there, and they're, then it's not a stretch to believe they remember there's an "h", but don't remember where. So they just put it in somewhere. So sad. Maybe we need something like the French and Spanish have to establish correct spelling and usage.

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    1. Yeah...I think it's just that they don't know the difference. It's just painful...

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  4. English not being my first language, I never knew how to spell that word correctly. "Whoa" seemed like the correct way, but in french we usually write "ouah" with an h at the end, so the spelling "woah" also seemed quite natural. To me it gives the impression of having your breath taken away by the surprise.

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  5. Maybe it's just me, but I feel that "Whoa" means stop/hold on/slow down while "Woah" is more like "wow" and also sounds kind of stoned.

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    1. I remember I used to assign different connotations to "gray" versus "grey." "Gray" seemed warmer to me, while "grey" was cooler. Doesn't matter that now I know it's really just a spelling difference between British and American English...I still think a "grey" sky sounds more drab and miserable than a "gray" one!

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    2. Gray is a better color - or maybe colour : )

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    3. Exactly! Whoa means stop; wwooaahhww (pronounced 'woooooooe' as in 'woe is me' but really slow and deep) means Holy Shit! :)

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