The Lexicographer's Rules

There’s room in any dictionary for all parts of speech, and if the amount of mail sent by interested word buffs is any indication, woot—an interjection or exclamation of celebration or revelry—is a favorite.

It comes in a variety of spellings offline and on. The most common, woot, whoot, and w00t are, for our purposes, variations of the same lexical item, especially since the aspirated aitch is growing less common in American English. The latter variant, w00t, has two zeroes in place of ohs, a common characteristic of words originating from online entertainment, especially in multiplayer games, where goofy and ironic l33tspeak sometimes prevails. Other online variations are w00+ and w007.

As is the case for most words, the most popular question about woot is “Where did it come from?” Unfortunately, its origins are disputed and, also like most words, it’s impossible to say with any certainty what the true origins are. Trying to come close to the term’s roots is a game of odds, Occam’s razor, and believability.

After a couple of examples of “whoot” or “woot” as an onomatopoeic representation of video game sounds in news stories from 1982, the earliest clear-cut use of the word found so far is in the name of the Atlantic City, N.J., entertainment tabloid The Whoot! which shows up in 1988 as a sponsor of the ugliest bartender contest in Philadelphia. In 2003 The Whoot! changed its name to the Atlantic City Weekly. Current AC Weekly editor Michael Epifanio says that The Whoot was so-named by founder Lew Steiner after “night owls who would pull all-nighters to scout out the bars, clubs and restaurants and then send the publication out to print.”

Other unlikely origins for the term have been proposed. In discussing the web site of consumer-electronics retailer Woot.com, a 2004 story in Ad Age claimed that the word originated of the phrase “Wow! loot” in the role-playing board game Dungeons and Dragons. The game, created in 1973 and released to the public in 1974, is unlikely as a point of origin. The Ad Age article (besides other sources referring to it) is the only source so far found that connects the word to the term in more than 30 years of the game’s existence. Given the popularity of D&D in the Eighties, it should have, by all rights, showed up in connection with the term woot long before 2004.

A related claim is that it came from multiplayer online games like Everquest and Ultima Online where it is said to have been associated with the phrase “wondrous loot,” or even with the same “wow, loot!” as in D&D, when a player’s character came across gold or wealth in the game. It’s also been credited to the online game Quake, where it is said to have been associated with the sound a player’s avatar makes when it jumps. While it is entirely possible that these games, which had tens of thousands of registered users, could have helped popularize the term, the first written evidence for woot occurred well before these games existed. Quake, the oldest of the three, was first released in 1996.

Another—and, frankly, halfhearted—claim, is that it comes from the Scottish interjection “hoot!” There is indeed such an interjection, according to the Dictionary of the Scots Language, and in various forms it dates as far back as 1698, appearing in such notable works as Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novel Kidnapped. The problem here, though, is that the Scots hoot! is negative. It’s not a crowing comment of satisfaction and delight, it’s “an exclamation used to express annoyance, disgust, incredulity or remonstrance or in dismissal of an opinion expressed by someone else,” the same as tut! or fie! While such inversions of meaning are not unheard of—nice essentially reversed its meaning over 600 years, going from meaning “silly or foolish” to “pleasant, kind, or neat in appearance"—they are not common and, like nice, take a long time. From the first citation the DSL has in 1698 to the latest in 1933, the Scots hoot shows no signs of changing.

More implausible as the origin is the backronym We Own(ed) the Other Team, also said to come from use in unnamed multiplayer video games. A backronym is a word interpreted as an acronym after that word has already been around a while. We know the word existed before the phrase because the phrase doesn’t show up in online discussions groups until March 2003. The longer phrase easily could have existed in multiplayer game chatter before then, but in general, once a term is popular in game chatter, it quickly also shows up in web and Usenet discussions related to the game, which is not the case here.

Elsewhere woot is claimed to come from root, the user name given in Unix-based operating systems to the administrator’s account. This lacks any supporting evidence at all, except for dubious claims of “I remember,” and is rebuffed here for the sake of completeness.

The most likely explanation, as is usually the case, is far simpler. Woot is, with some caveats, probably derived from and most likely popularized by the dance catch phrase of 1993, “whoot, there it is!” In clubs and on dance floors across the country, in half-time shows and in baseball stadiums, “whoot, there it is” and plain old “woot!” were shouted long and loud by millions. It was used by hype men at hip-hop shows, dancers and cheerleaders at ball games, DJs at discos, and probably by ball-callers at bingos.

If woot had any kind of real presence before the songs—as something other than the name of the publication from Atlantic City—it has not yet been found. As a clear-cut term of celebration or revelry, it simply did not show up in the trillions of words published before 1993 and currently archived online and in periodical databases. Even if it did exist and for some reason did not show up in print, the “whoot, there it is” dance catch phrase certainly reinforced any pre-existing usage. That all relevant citations for the term appear after 1993 supports this.

The story of woot, as we know it, is simple. There were two similar songs on the charts that year. In April “Whoot There It Is” by 95 South (Ichiban Records) was the number seven best-selling song in Central Florida, according, to the Orlando Sentinel. “Whoomp! (There It Is),” by Tag Team (Life Records) out of Atlanta showed up at number 15 on Billboard’s R&B singles 27 May 1993 and stayed for 45 weeks on the Billboard top 100, where it reached number 2. It was the more popular of the two songs.

Both tunes came out of the dance music scene, where it was chanted by crowds, much like “the roof, the roof, the roof is on fire,” in the clubs. By June 1993 both songs were popular enough across the country that USA Today and other newspapers wrote about their similarities—they are strikingly alike, fuddy-duds were already complaining about overdosing on the new catch-phrase, and good-natured arguments took place about which was the canonical form, whoot or whoomp. “Whoops, there it is” was another, less-common variant. (The three variants, incidentally, are good evidence that the term was originally oral.)

Jay-Ski, who produced “Whoot, There It Is,” said in a 1997 interview, “There were eight versions of that going around. The idea came from the streets, and even though the 95 South one might have been recorded first, it was Tag Team who released it earlier. I sold three-and-a-half million of mine, though. And now I’ll be sitting at home watching a football game and hearing it played in the stadium—that’s a big thrill. We even were invited to perform it at the top of the fifth inning in the fifth game of the ’93 World Series between the Phillies and Toronto, and that was the best crowd that I’ve ever performed for.”

Cecil “DC” Glenn and Steve “Roll’n” Gibson, the two men in the musical act “Tag Team,” say in the book Colorado Rocks by G. Brown (Pruett Publishing Co., 2004, p. 128) that they picked up the “Whoomp” in their song from the Arsenio Hall show:

“People had been saying ‘There it is’ forever. Everybody in Arsenio Hall’s television audience used to the ‘Wooof’ chant. We put that together with the ‘There it is’ dance-floor chant we were hearing at the club.

Gibson recalled that DC said, “Oh, man, we need to do a song called, ‘Whoom, there it is.”

“All I said was, ‘How do you spell it?”

The claim that their “whoomp” came from Arsenio’s audience chant should not necessarily be taken at face value: memories are notoriously off-kilter when it comes to remembering such things. They are clouded by wishful thinking, cognitive dissonance, and a desire to be helpful.

But the show aired from 1989 to 1994 and there’s no doubt that the “woofing” of the Arsenio audience was much-imitated on television shows such as Saturday Night Live, that the similar-sounding chant “whoot whoot whoot” or “whoomp whoomp whoomp” was shouted across the country, and that, for a time, “whoot, there it is!” was an immensely popular catch phrase anywhere in America where people gathered to party or celebrate.

It was also used by Julia Roberts’s character in the 1990 movie Pretty Woman, where her low class use “whoo(f) whoo(f)” was contrasted to the refined setting she was using it in. She even does the hand-gesture of the Arsenio audience.

It’s my guess all that is left of that fad now is the neat little celebratory word “woot!” used mainly an exclamation of joy at minor victories and unexpected pleasures, with a slightly less common use as a flat sarcastic remark in response to a minor disappointment or letdown. It’s enough.

I always thought it was a simple typo of “woo” (as in “woo hoo") that caught fire, primarily in EverQuest and Ultima Online.

But hey, I’m not an expert.

“This lacks any supporting evidence at all and is merely rebuffed here for the sake of completeness.”

It seems as though you didn’t spend any time at all researching this perspective. Leet speak comes from the hacker scene, particularly on IRC in the early 90’s. There is all kinds of supporting evidence for this. Why would the word w00t spead into the Internet from the dance scene when every other word associated with leet speak comes from the hacker scene, which is more closely connected with the Internet?

http://www.textfiles.com/magazines/BTW/cs941211.acr
http://www.textfiles.com/magazines/HDK/hdk02.txt

Those files prove nothing, Decius. The first one is from 1994 and neither contains woot, whoot, w00t or any other variant. So, you’re wrong.

As someone who was a part of the scene in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I can assure you that I am well aware of l33t—and I’m hyper-aware of the rubbish theories and provably false origin stories that are spread about it.

Further, you’re missing the point. “W00t” is newer than woot/whoot. The evidence seems to show that it came later, not first.

Sorry, I dropped in the wrong textfiles link. The one below does contain the word woot, used as a proper name. It is from 1995, and it is not proof that the word w00t as an exclamation originated in the hacker scene. The links are, however, examples of the fact that a wide array of creative words were used in the hacker scene in the early 90’s, of which w00t certainly was one.

The absense of evidence is not evidence of absense. For the most part, IRC conversations are not logged publically. Your article dismisses this origin “theory” without the slightest analysis. If I’m wrong (or my memories have deceived me), you certainly haven’t proven it. In fact, you haven’t demonstrated that you’ve given it the slightest thought before “rebuking it for the sake of completeness.”

The fact is that there is a massive collection of slang that was created by the hacker scene and undeniably much of that slang was later adopted by the gaming community. To completely ignore that context in the course of analyzing the origins of one of the slang words popular in the gaming scene seems wrong to me, and thats the reason for my comment.

If this is a rubbish theory that is provably false, please do so. 

http://www.textfiles.com/magazines/BTW/cs950504.acr

Grant, I honestly think you are missing the point, even if you’re factually right. Please bare with me. The fact that people say whoop isn’t as important in this context as how whoop became w00t.

Are people saying w00t today because they recall this dance song from 1993, or are they saying it because of the influence of gamers? I think clearly the later. I’m open to evidence to the contrary, but lets move on.

Why did gamers start saying it in the late 90’s? Was it because they recalled this dance song from 1993, or is it because they drew it from the hacker scene, who’d been saying it much longer? This is harder to ascertain from the written evidence, but my impression is that this is true.

Does it make sense that the hacker scene would have picked w00t up from this dance song? Yes, it does. The song was popular in 1993, which was right about the time when a great deal of leet speak was being generated on IRC as people outside of academia first started getting access to the internet. Its quite possible that a popular song would have influenced the slang that was being created.

Hackers obviously pulled from a wide array of cultural sources in producing a vast volume of slang. Gamers obviously still say a number of other words from this origin, which are also influencing popular culture. One example is pwn, which was recently used in a SouthPark episode.

The question is whether this is really about the influence of the early 90’s dance scene on popular culture or the influence of the early 90’s hacker scene on popular culture. While the connection to “Whoop there it is” is interesting, I think focusing on it as the origin of this term is to ignore the forest for a tree. Its like saying that gamers don’t say pwn because of the hacker scene, they say pwn because of the ancient origins of the word ownership. It may be technically correct but it doesn’t help you understand what is really going on with popular culture.

Is it impossible that r00t/w00t arose independently, and its meaning then merged with the “whoomp” of pop culture? I, too, remember the act of “rooting boxes” being celebrated with cries of “root!” or “woot!”, and I was thoroughly detatched from the mainstream at the time.

If anyone has video of the CTF participants at Defcon 6 (1998), I think it would support this story. Sadly, I wouldn’t know where to look for such footage. I just know that, at the time, we didn’t connect it with Arsenio or any music.

It was nice of Decius to link to my site, but I have to side with Grant on this one, insofar that any usages before 1993-1994 online or elsewhere are utterly decimated by the meme-bomb of “Whoo[tp]! There it is!” and variants. There are similar cases of this, where a term or catchphrase on a movie causes it to pop up everywhere at once, and people may not know it comes from that original mass media creation.

Watching the video for “Whoot! There it is” ensures that anybody with even passive proximity to something blasting that phrase over and over would pick it up:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBwvFBxf_Eg

Online, I tend to use Google groups as an objective source of term phrases, by seeing when something comes up in context. In that measurement, the first time I find it used in the manner we expect it is by a card gamer in October of 1994:

http://groups.google.com/group/rec.games.deckmaster.marketplace/msg/06964d199ffa5598?dmode=source

What I’ve found, and Grant can correct me here if he’s found differently, is that part of the issue with “online” is that post 1995 (AOL) and 1999 (everybody else), you have this massive influx of people, especially high schoolers, who are more likely than anyone to seize and rework language as fast as they possibly can to stay unique or because something strikes them. As a result, you can see a term which might have had the equivalent of a few uses within some relatively small social groups suddenly “burst” worldwide online now, obliterating that (small, almost insider) use for the new, massive use.

A similar situation seems to exist with the word “schwag”, for example, with everything from backronyms to insane origin stories popped up because now hundreds of thousands of people use the term.

Like Powers I disagree with your conclusion. w00t came from the hacker scene of the early nineties and not the dance scene. Crossover from the dance scene to the online gaming world seems a little tenuous at best.

I always thought that the music of that era was using the word whoop, not woot.

Unfortunately, evidence for this assertion other than my memory is hard to come by. As I do remember an actual hacking group called w00t that existed in the mid nineties.

A quick search (and I do mean quick) shows a Usenet use of w00t (with the zeros) on comp.security.unix in March of 1995 here
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.security.unix/browse_thread/thread/6e895327b5feee8/f547d26fafeda9ff?lnk=st&q=w00t#f547d26fafeda9ff

as part of an email address Op8!w00t@clark.net. The address was posted in a list of 3000+ other addresses accusing them all of being software pirates.

Google obscures the email address so you may need to download the post locally and do a search to see it.

I will acquiesce though since one usenet post, that isn’t really that old, and my memory aren’t enough to be definitive on this matter.

- SR

The most accurate definition of “w00t” is found several entries down in the Urban Dictionary, to wit:

History: The current-day use of the word w00t stems from hackers in the early to mid 80’s. While communicating with each other groups of hackers such as Razor1911 would need lingo which nobody else would be able to understand to express milestones in their hacking. One such milestone was gaining root access, but the term rooted or “gained root access” was easily understood so the term was changed to w00t to help disguise. Because of the difficulty of “rooting” many times the term w00t would be much in a celebratory tone. It later evolved to simply be a celebratory remark rather than a hacking milestone.”

It is always possible for a word to have multiple origins in different contexts, but having begun programming in the late ‘60s I can tell you with certainty that this origin of “w00t” is neither rubbish nor provably false.

During my second year of college (~1990-1991) I played on a MUD called Pegasus, based out of the University of Iowa.  There was a guy called ch’od who often said “woot” (all lower case - all letters) as an expression mild celebration.  If memory serves me correct he was a computer science major student at Champaign-Urbana.

I have no idea where he picked it up but, I’ve been saying it since college.  So it was definitely around before those stupid songs came out.

Decius, I searched trillions of words of fee-based and free databases, documents, text files, discussion groups, Usenet and so forth looking for evidence to support the “root” derivation. There’s no evidence. While I do this sort of word research for a living, I acknowledge that I could have missed something, but unless somebody else gives me hard evidence that shows I’m wrong, then what I’ve written above stands.

“Hard evidence” means written or recorded uses accompanied by a verifiable date.

As I write above, the main problem with *any* derivation from *any* online arena is that earlier uses of the term are found in music and in print before they are found in the digital realm. Same for the cs950504 file: it’s from 1994. It’s too new to prove anything since the songs were released in 1993.

Bring me evidence other than “I remember! I insist!” and we’ll talk.

Anyway, it’s not really about the dance scene vs. the hacker scene: it’s about two hugely popular hit songs vs. a tiny in-group that can’t be proven to have used the word at all.

“Myself,” independent derivation is possible but unknowable. I welcome evidence of it.

“Spac Rogue,” you need to better read what I wrote. There were two songs: one used “whoomp” and the other used “whoot.”

“Quux,” Urban Dictionary is not a reliable source. Find something better and then we’ll talk.

To reiterate, all the talk of it coming from “root” is unverified. Besides the lack of evidence, R to W transitions in l33t are exceedingly unusual, so “root” to “woot” is unlikely.

Shawn, do you have any kind of printouts or log files or anything from that period? It’s the kind of evidence we lexicographers search in vain for.

You’re all wrong.

Elmer Fudd was the first to say it, in a 1948 WB cartoon where he verbally mangled a desire to ‘root out all rabbits.’

You forgot the best woot of all: www.woot.com, the one-item-a-day ecommerce site for geeks and fans of cheap gizmos. The “ist” family of sites aside, this is some of the best writing on the Web!

Grant,

I wish I did, but I was telnetting from a computer in our university library, so I can’t verify it.  But, being as I’m not a lexicographer, my memory is good enough for me.  :)

No flies on you, Grant! And keep your shotgun loaded.

If linguists privilege logocentric origins, can we say that ‘l33t-speak’ represents a novel kind of reverse engineering of language? That is, rather than developing speech-to-writing it has its origins in keyboard- (or keypad-) based efficiency, then to electronic writing, and finally to speech? I understand that ‘w00t’ is indeed vocalized by the young and the gamers.

I wouldn’t say “efficiency,” Peter, since l33t isn’t that efficient. It takes longer to type. I know there are English-to-l33t translators now, but those are stunts.

I wouldn’t call it “novel,” either. There are precursors to l33t. Telegraph lingo, for one, though that left us with, basically, only “SOS” and “POTUS,” outside those who still use the old number codes in ham radio. Of course, as you know, there are also the respelling and acronym fads of the 1830s, but those left us only with “OK.”

I suspect l33t will be the same and will leave few remnants. I’d say all that’s left of l33t these days is stunts or consciously ironic uses. I don’t think I’ve seen an unironic use of it in years, keeping in mind that l33t is only a small subset of all online slang and language.

I also wouldn’t call it a “reverse engineering.” Language is language, though, of course, spoke and written language are very different.

whoot != w00t

I agree with the others here who see these as two separate words, with different usages like “aye” and “eye”.  I doubt you’ll find much use of “w00t” in your research, as it’s use is probably mostly in chat, and it until recently hasn’t made it into any lyrics.

Maybe try:
http://www.irclog.org/
http://bash.org

Based on the evidence I’ve seen (which is more than filtering the net) they are the same. I believe there is a clear connection lexically, orthographically, and historically.

yr disbelief that a term this popular could not have come from the “small community of hackers” is short sighted.  the hacking community is inextricably linked to the greater irc as a whole. the irc community is closely tied to the gaming community where it gained it’s first mainsteam popularity. as there are gamers in all walks of life it has now reached pop-culture status. as there seems to be little argument that this term originated in the early nineties the fact the it took 15 years to become such a popular term runs contrary rather than proves that this term originated with multi platinum dance songs.

a rather less “scientific” explanation is that there is no specific orgin that can be pinned down. “woot” is easily identifiable with woo-hoo, an exclamation of delight, having never heard the world before. its popularity can probably be attributed to the fact that “w00t” looks cool in type even if it sounds silly verbally.

ppl, you are so pathetic, it’s … well … fu :)

Well, Grant, in spite of a number of commenters who appear to share my understanding of this I’ll take your side for now. Absent any evidence of use by the hacker scene in the early 90’s you can’t even get to the question that I raised about the influence IRC had on MMORPG gamers. I agree that the evidence seems to be on your side here.

Unfortuantely, a lot of the conversations that this community consisted of occured on unarchived IRC channels, email lists, and in ‘93 a lot of it was on bulletin board systems. Unless someone can come up with some old logs I don’t think there is anything out that that ought to convince you otherwise.

Regards…

Excellent article, and I’m glad you debunked some of the more irritating claims of etymology. ‘Wow, loot!’ and ‘We owned the other team’ are just so blatantly false as retrospective attributions of the term. While your article doesn’t definitively prove the dance catchphrase theory, it does do a good job of at least dismissing all the others.

Here’s someone using woot as their handle in 1989:

http://groups.google.com/group/eunet.jokes/browse_thread/thread/c2107f69ce264153/2dc469ee31f5f431?lnk=st&q=woot#2dc469ee31f5f431

But even if “woot” comes from bass music, it’s w00t that the kids say now.  So the more interesting question, to my mind, is *why* the term caught on in the hacker community.  Hence the woot/root connection, which is well documented in text files from the mid-90’s.

By the way, the name of the Atlantic City paper was pronounced “hoot”, like the sound an owl makes, and thus seems irrelevant here.

Its always amusing to hear an ‘expert’ tell us what we know from having-been-there-personal-experience is not true.

Don’t fret...just be happy that one of our words has been recognized by the outside world.

w00t!!

Thanks, Tim, I’ve seen that. But it’s impossible to say that’s the same “woot.” There’s no context at at all and the original sender’s email address is dead so we can’t find out from him.

Also--and again--those text files are too new to be of use. They come *after* the woot used in the the music, the woot that, as shown repeatedly in newspapers, books, and on the Internet, was was used *before* the “hackers” were using it.

I mean seriously, people. I was a part of that scene in the late 1980s and I can’t believe ANY of you were. It’s like talking to a Frenchman about World War II: to hear them tell it, EVERYBODY in their families was on the side of the resistance and nobody supported the Vichy Regime. Your “I wuz there l0l” statements are just not convincing me.

Regor, people lie. They lie to researchers all the time. They also try to be helpful and stretch facts. And they misremember. And they want to feel like they were a part of something: of a movement, or an era, or a special group that is now seen in a rosy light. So, I don’t accept “I remember” as evidence unless it comes from a highly impeccable source who uses their real name, can show me definitively that they were at least involved in the scene, and who has demonstrated great feats of memory and reliability or has made a special study of the scene they claim to have been a part of.

“I mean seriously, people. I was a part of that scene in the late 1980s and I can’t believe ANY of you were.”

Careful where you step, sir, with the sweeping generalizations.

You’re right, Jason. Sorry. Some people, like you, use their real names, have public bona fides, and have a credible record of being involved.

Grant, here are a few references to w00t from hacker zines including an IRC chat snippet in a CDC zine from 1994:

http://www.memestreams.net/thread/bid34861/blogid10324567/

Still after 1993, so this doesn’t undermine your primary assertion, but it does refute your statement that the early 90’s hacker scene “can’t be proven to have used the word at all.”

No problem, Grant.

Decius and I are buddies from a ways back, and he was the one who got my attention about this discussion on here.

I agree with your theory, recognizing that it’s a theory and that without documentation to back it up, and also understand the deeper currents of what’s going on here. Specifically, there’s a correlation between being “first” with being “best”. Like their accents, a person’s slang or lingo is very personal, and to see pronouncements like “it was popular in gamer culture in the late 1990s” begats the antithesis, “it was not popular elsewhere and this is the first time it shows up this way”. A value judgement, when it’s just a matter of tracing a word fad.

Worse, this word seems to be rather, in my opinion, generic: I’m sure you can find films in the 1940s with someone going “Woot!” or other outbursts that could be interpreted any way. But when a “history” of the word is put out, it rubs people who used a term the wrong way, even if it wasn’t necessarily the source for the current popular term. It’s emotional.

Part of what you mention in your article and responses is what I do: get my hands on old printouts and put them up:

http://www.textfiles.com/bbs/PRINTOUTS/

From this and other efforts, I traced the term “K-Rad”, which has had a nice long life as a term in online life, back to a specific BBS in Minnesota in the 1983-1984 period. But part of what assisted me is that “K-Rad” is a very odd word. “Woot”, or even “w00t”, just doesn’t seem that hard to independently have pop up, like saying “Welp” or “Wuh”.

Another similar term is “Zero Day”, where I can very specifically show logs where people refer to “3 day or less warez” in terms of a game being released on AE lines and pirate boards 3 days or less after it hits the stores, with the stakes upping until the claim of “zero day” warez, coming out before or as the game is released.

That this was taken, over the course of time, to mean purely “security” exploits and having companies like Norton use them, could really annoy somebody who thought of the term as “theirs”. But it doesn’t diminish either the original usage or that the current usage is the most popular.

“So, I don’t accept ‘I remember’ as evidence unless it comes from a highly impeccable source who uses their real name, can show me definitively that they were at least involved in the scene, and who has demonstrated great feats of memory and reliability or has made a special study of the scene they claim to have been a part of.”

Now Grant, as one who was a part of that “scene in the late 1980s,” you can be a bit kinder to those of us who do use aliases.  Internet identities and aliases abound, but that doesn’t make us all liars, nor does that make our knowledge unverifiable.  I go by “Vinnie” - not my real name - but certainly real enough to be known by on the Internet, in my own family, and by my wife.  Just because we revel in creating identities does not mean we lie.

In your defense: as a linguist who spent a great deal of time researching the intersection between speech and writing in IRC forums during the early 90s, it is true what Grant says about sources. People do lie (even to themselves, and even when they don’t know it - memory is elusive and fallible more than most will admit) and the experts do know something about language study and methodology that “those who were there” do not.

People rarely monitor their own speech, and when asked to, do not even see what they are doing.  For example, I asked a forum a general question: “do you write/type like you speak on IRC?” Invariably, the answer was, “Yes! I type exactly like I speak.” - capital letters, punctuation, and sentence boundaries included, which of course, do not exist or have very different corollaries in speech. Linguistically speaking, no, pauses in speech are not equivalent to the use of a comma.

My first encounter with “woot” was in EverQuest in 1999 or 2000, so I’m the least to know of its origins.  And I always thought it was “Whoop, there it is!” So much for my memory.

So, “woot! for ‘woot!’”

Cheers,
-Vinnie-

Interestingly, Vinnie, the alias problem means that most reliable sources for underworld language tend to be police reports and court transcripts. Still, aliases are not a complete barrier. Many historical dictionaries do cite works whose authors are unknown or who are using known aliases.

I invented WOOT in 1999 while on Usenet as the sound made by the mythical cross between a dog and an owl.
A misspelling of the word “dowel” became “dowl”.
When asked what a “dowl” was, I said “A cross between a dog and an owl. It goes ‘woot’”.
I had never heard woot before that.
I doubt the credit is mine (duh) but that’s how it came to be in my world.

A particularly interesting conversation.

I particularly agree with Jason Scott’s point that it’s a rather generic phrase.  It seems to me like tracing back “shucks.” (Okay, I’m not an etymology expert so that might be a bad example)

I’d like to say that the plausibility of hearing “Whoomp” or “Whoot” and then using it in the situations more common to today seems a small bit of a stretch.  At least more of a stretch than the “root” to “woot” conversion.  And, like the Elmer Fudd reference, I don’t actually think there’s that much of a difference between the two.

Then I figured I’d look at the cultures that use it.  To be honest, the gaming community/IRC/Hacker community seems to make a lot more sense.  Again, I’m not an etymologist, but I’d think that if the Pop song was it’s origins it would have caught on quicker in the population which listens to pop music, instead of mulling about the “underground” until slowly picked up by imitators and then spread rapidly as the expanse of the internet actually took hold.

I feel strongly in support of author’s “dance theory”. Especially after watching the clip “Whoot, There it is”.
I am a Russian-speaking guy from Ukraine. I do computers starting from 1980. I wrote my first program in 1970. What is important to know is that before 80-th Russians designed their own computers and the programming was on the rise as well as hacking. I am not a gamer though.
Now, if I would be asked to translate above phrase “Whoot, There it is”, the outcome might have been “Вот, вот”. By substituting W for “В” (which is how it sounds in Russian) we would get “Wot, wot”. As it is obvious, Russian word “вот” in general means “there it is”, “here it is” being frequently accompanied with a pointing gesture (as the folks in the clip do). If I am looking for someone in a crowd, I might exclaim addressing my companion, “Вот он”, “There he is”. A woman might invite someone to admire her features, or dress, turning around and saying “Вот”, “Here I am”. We might say “Вот-вот” in confirmation of something like “Yes, yes”. In Russian possible to substitute “Да-да” for “вот-вот”, but American English has different meaning for “Dah dah”. The major idea is, we use “Вот” to point at something/someone, or to attract someone’s attention to something/someone, or to confirm/strengthen something. There are other uses, those above are sufficient.
Now, I do not think it would be my job to explain how and when the Russian word “Вот” was incorporated in American English. But certainly there have been plenty of opportunities. Why not to start from 1945 when American and Russian soldiers met in Berlin?
As for the variant “w00t”, it seems simple to me. First, it was a nice touch to invent l00k, with zeros representing wide-opened eyes. Now, it is all the same in whoot/woot. If I found a treasure and want to show someone, here I am, using “w00t” with excitement and wide-opened eyes. For gamers also would be a good expression, as an exclamation of victory, “Вот тебе!” - “Here it is for you!” - “w00t” - the wide-opened eyes of dying enemy.
Final word on hacking. It is not my intention to leave an impression that Russians invented it. Yet there was whole epoch, during which Russians on a basis of everyday duties exercised backward engineering in computer industry. If there is such a thing as international hacker culture, one should suggest some significant contribution to it from Russian part of the world.

I was doing some searches on what may be part of the evolution of Whoot.  It appears on the Usenet archives that saying, “What a Hoot” was EXTREMELY commonplace, but as the 80’s came to an end there was netlingo’s and geekspeak becoming commonplace.  The phrase “what a hoot” now appeared once or twice as “whoot” or like a siren, “whooot, whooot” at the same time the term “Woot” is common all the way back to 1991 in geekspeak phrases such as “Woot Dafuk” a phonetic of “What The...”.

Regardless and unfortunately, it didn’t get real popular until after the song by 95-South when it’s Usenet use just became border SPAM.  I think the potential of the SPAM issue is why it became W00T with zero’s, because eventually a Sysop would start to block the woot spam and the l33ts would get around it with the number schema.

The song lyric theory is a little off considering the actual lyric is ‘Whoomp there it is’. Not likely, I say. :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whoomp!_(There_It_Is)

A.

Alex, learn to read better. There were two songs. One was “Whoot, There It Is.”

UberTod, where do you find “Woot Dafuk” from 1991?

Grant -

I have nothing to contribute regarding the actual origins… but you say “the text files are too old”, when clearly what you mean is that they are too new - i.e., more recent than the songs.

Sorry to nitpick, but the first two or three times you mentioned it I had to go back and re-read the sentence to be sure I had understood.

Anatoliy -

Readers who don’t “do” Cyrillic might not be aware that Russian “В” is pronounced like English “V” while Russian “Б” (which looks like the number 6), is pronounced like English “B”.  So “Бот” is pronounced like “vote”.

Just thought I’d clarify for any uniglots out there.

Grant, my bad, not 1991, it was 1992.  I was using the Google Groups search in the “Usenet 20 Year Archive” search http://groups.google.com/advanced_group_search

The stuff from 1990-91 was someone trying to describe an umlaut (sp?) with the name Wurzi (Woot-zi two dots over the U)

In 1989 someone had a nick/handle of MacWoot.

Google has done us all well giving us the ability to search back to 1981 in our online history :D

Nice catch, Marc. I didn’t even realize I made that mistake--twice. And nobody else caught it, either. I’ve gone back and fixed it.

Yes, Tod, I know all about Google Groups searching of Usenet. I even have it as a shortcut in all of my browsers so that all I have to do is type “u searchterm” in the URL field of the browser, hit return, and it loads my results for me. Every historical English-language lexicographer uses Google Groups, especially for recent slang, but they also search far and beyond that into the deep Web, into fee-based closed archives, and into their own collections of books and miscellany.

holy shit will you all shut the fuck up? jesus christ, look at all these words! look at all these nerds! arguing over the origin of a l33tspeak word that DOESN’T MEAN ANYTHING and has infinite variations…

Are you all mac users, perchance?

Please respond with a serious, long-winded, opinionated and humorless statement of “facts”, taking care to sound as educated and erudite as possible, by using words like erudite.

Merci.

Marc -
Reading your comments on 12/16/07, I have gotten even more confused.
For starters, there is a problem with using “V” or “W” as substitutes for Russian “B”. The way you “do” Cyrillic by matching “V” with “B” is arguable. Small example: Voltaire = “Волтер” and Walter = “Валтер” - in both cases Russian transcription is the same “В”.
Now, somehow Russian “Б” got into picture despite the fact that I did not mention it. My best guess is that you are trying to give us a warning in regard to a possibility of confusing English “B” with Russian “В”. Unfortunately, during the process the Russian “Вот” became Russian “Бот” in your interpretation. “Бот” means “small boat” or “rubber boot”.  The matter became completely impossible to decipher after your transliteration “Vote” while it should have been “Bot” (and sound as “bot” – there is really nothing special to it).
That said, I would like to return to the original topic of matching “woot/whoot” with Russian “вот”.
“Вот” sounds exactly as English “what” to me. I am completely aware that one should be extremely careful in making similar statements. The problem is that average “Russian ear” is somewhat different from average “English ear”. One striking example is the case with “Hudson” river. Somehow it became “Гудзон” in Russian, so transliteration would be “Goodzone”, which is nowhere even close to original name in pronunciation as well as in the meaning. With this in mind, I would like to stress it again. “What” would be the closest vocal image of Russian “Вот”. What might have been amusing is that English word “what” is generally used in questions, while Russian “вот”, sounding exactly the same, and is a form of confirmation. If one to entertain her/himself by playing with this, there should have been found a way for incorporation of something sounding as “what” into any writing having “what” as its vocabulary item. Here comes “whoot”.

Anatoliy -

Ooops!  I typed “бот” when I meant to type “вот"… my bad.  I only dragged the letter “б” into the discussion because most non-Russian speakers have cognitive dissonance when you show them/us a letter that looks like “B”, but you say it’s to be pronounced some other way… unless you then show that there really is a letter that can be pronounced the way we expect it to be pronounced (and it even looks like our lower-case “b”, if you squint), we tend to get stuck on thinking of “В” as “B”.  (In most fonts, there’s no visible difference.)
So my intention was to clarify - but then I screwed it up by making a typo.  Черт!

To respond a bit to your point about the Russian ear, though - in my experience, Russians (unless they emigrated to an English-speaking country as children) tend to hear and pronounce “W” more like a German “W” (which is pretty close to an English “V") than an English “W”.  It’s one of the hallmarks of a Russian accent, along with an inability to say “th”.  And it’s reinforced by the way that Russian translators transliterate - to use your own example, Walter = “Валтер” is excellent if your friend Walter happens to be German.  If he’s American or English, though, “Уалтер” would be a much better choice.

In any case, I wasn’t disputing your hypothesis as to the genesis of “w00t!”, merely trying to make your remarks more comprehensible to the non-Cyrillic crowd.  A task at which I failed miserably, and have now compounded my failure.

People seem to be having a hard time believing that the language of pastey whiteboy hackers could be influenced by ‘dance culture’.  Two points:

(1) Remember that phreaker culture was less overwhelmingly white and suburban than hackerdom as a whole.
(2) More importantly, in the early 90s rap music was a ubiquitous part of American pop culture.  Even kids who hated rap knew phrases like “whoo(t|mp)! there it is” and “word to your mother”.  This wasn’t underground stuff only known to aficionados.  Hackers weren’t isolated from pop culture at large.

The earliest use of ‘woot’ as an English interjection I’ve found on Usenet - in a computer gaming newsgroup no less - is from September 1993 and directly references the song:
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.flight-sim/msg/19945d013c8d40c8

The IRC chat snippet from 1994 that Decius linked to is interesting:

“< - #hack> Werd niggahz be dissong on me… w00t”

Here ‘woot’ is directly associated with the language of rap.

The example from that 1994 collectible card game post is “Woot! I got ‘da Land!” It’s interesting that the poster used a non-standard ‘da’ rather than ‘the’.  I can’t be sure why exactly, but it could indicate mock African-American speech.  (This is just suggestive; there are other possibilities, of course.)

All of this is consistent with the musical origin theory.  I haven’t seen any attested early examples that contradict it.

Marc –
No arguments regarding “W”. Indeed, Walt Whitman (in fact, Walter…) is translated as “Уолт Уитмен”. You are right about “th”. No matter how hard I am trying, nobody would understand my pronunciation. My tongue would usually get lost somewhere in my nostrils. ;-) So, I gave up and do what black guys here in Brooklyn, NY do. I have been deliberately ignorant with this, saying “three” as “tree”. Amazingly, everybody is happy! Please do not kill yourself over a typo. Besides, your “bot” gave me additional impulse for discussion, which I am going to use answering other guys.

Didn’t the work “woot” appear in a Bloom County cartoon sometime in the 80s? Looks like I’ve got some researchin’ to do…

Nice, w00t in a Bloom County cartoon.  I think AT is onto something, it stirred a “bill the cat” comment in my head.  I think I will look that one up too.

Sorry to the computer people out there, but I find that often times people from that community are very dedicated to it, and are sure that most terms that are used in it are derived from it.  My apologies for the observation.  As a DJ an MC and a southerner I have to tell you that “whoot” and “whoomp” were floating around dance clubs all through the early ‘90s, especially in Florida and Atlanta.  To ignore that various spellings would seem to indicate that it wasn’t a text based phenomenon would be a mistake.
I believe that the one trick that you are missing here is the cause for its recent resurgence.  This can mostly be credited to the infamous “Bubb Rubb” report from the San Francisco Bay Area.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PzoWuA2qPAo

I don’t get why some are so resistant to the idea that a ‘club’ song could possibly influence geek language. As a D&D;player in the mid ‘80s, my group often picked up black slang (def, ill, fresh) and used it—first in a mocking way, which often turned into common parlance (witness the use of ‘dope’ and ‘bomb’ in the late ‘90s).

Although I don’t recall using “Whoot” from the song, it wouldn’t surprise me if we did. We certainly picked up an awful lot of other terms from rap (and later, gangsta rap) music.

i made up this sucks on ice, then rocket power took the credit :( now im tryin to start up “I’m crunch-wrap supreme’n” to mean I’m good to go or ready. hopefully i will get credit for this from this very forum when it is heard in a popular song in the near future. Not that this helped with the etymology stuff. Anyway, i believe urban dictionary. makes the most logical sense. why would the term wait 14 years to become popular from a song from so long ago when the geek community has become pretty mainstream recently bringing many glorious things to popularity such as woot. I base this on absolutely nothing and you guys want more sources than my professors, its crazy

Just another anecdote:

I used IRC about 24/7 starting in the early ‘90s, in some--ahem--somewhat less than legitimate places, and the word “w00” and later “w00t” began to pop up there mid-’90s. I remember this because it used to annoy me a lot.

I think the closest definition I could give would be to compare it to Homer Simpson’s “Woo-hoo!” (I’m not saying it came from that… I’m just saying the usage was the same). It also matches the spirit of the word in the WOTY’s definition.

I was around the “there it is” songs in their heyday (in an all-black school, even) and I never thought of the “whoomp” or “whoot” as being the same word or even related. I always thought of the whoomp/whoot as more of a street slang onomatopoeia. Where’s the booty at? (Turns and points while making “Whoot” noise) There it is!

Well, at least now someone has pointed me to this blog, to explain where such obviously false etymologies keep coming from.  I believe Grant fraudulently dismissed the cracker origin of the term just to generate controversy; 100 blog posts = 10,000 page views = increased ad-views for A Way With Words.  Shame on you Grant.  Gaming obviously wasn’t the origin; oral mimicry wasn’t (and to some extent still isn’t) where any 1eetspeek comes from.  Typographical ease is typically a typical factor.  But ignoring the entire BBS subculture of the 70s & 80s?  Ignoring phreakers?  Ignoring crackers?  For what, just to generate comments and pageviews on an obscure blog?  Please get some ethics, sir.

Well, Connel, where’s your evidence? Prove the term was used then. You’ve got dick, squat, bupkus, nothing, and fuck-all unless you have evidence. So far the only thing the people who claim “woot” came out of online culture first have is hot air to support their claims.

And, if you would read the comments above (rather than sniping with ill-informed rubbish), you’d see that I’m not “ignoring the BBS subculture"--I was a part of it. I was there.

I know the main difficulty that the online proponents have is that they don’t understand that woot and w00t are the same lexical item, two little zeros be damned. They wrongly treat them as separate items when they are, in fact, simply co-variants of the same term.

Besides that: typographical ease? Are you kidding me? l33t is more difficult to type.

Good job Connel… and great response Grant… I have to agree with BOTH of you :D

But just a note… the comment in ref to typographical ease stating “l33t is more difficult to type” is not an accurate statement.  After being a MVS / UX and even DOS coder for 15 years and telling the system how to talk to it’s hardware, l33t speak is second nature.

I’m surprised you missed the character Woot from L. Frank Baum’s “The Tin Woodman of Oz”.

I designed a w00t! shirt several years ago and did my own “research” into the origins of the word which I shared here:
http://www.offlinetshirts.com/computer/lingo.cgi/woot2

For what it’s worth, I believe w00t! (that particular spelling at any rate) did begin in the MMORPG scene (and from EverQuest in particular).

Decius’ citation here:
http://www.memestreams.net/thread/bid34861/blogid10324567/

seems to support the jump from dance/rap to l337:

> Werd niggahz be dissong on me… w00t
(...)
> *CdC says* w00p w00p w00p! n1ggaz b3 on the CdC hyp3 tip!@#

The use of w00t here and its repetition as w00p, together with the fake ebonics seems to suggest that the writers are channeling the song (or the phenomenon born of the song) in question.

It’s possible that when “Whoot” hit saturation, someone took the term and combined it with root for irony or kicks. w00t, that would mean everyone is right!

This reminds me of the episode of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” in which Richard Lewis insists that he invented the phrase “the ____ from hell”: http://www.hbo.com/larrydavid/episode/season3/episode24.html

People have a natural desire to believe they were at the center of phenomena, and it’s unsurprising that old school net users want to believe that they were responsible for “w00t”. But yeah, I don’t see much evidence that they did anything more than adopt a term from elsewhere and make it their own.

Reading through this, I was thinking exactly what “wes” said. KRON-TV’s 1/23/2003 story on exhaust whistles became a serious internet meme for a while.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KRON-TV#Bubb_Rubb

There was a period where that damn video of Bubb Rubb yelling, “Whoo(t) Whoo(t)!!” was all over the place.

“wes” said:
“I believe that the one trick that you are missing here is the cause for its recent resurgence.  This can mostly be credited to the infamous “Bubb Rubb” report from the San Francisco Bay Area.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PzoWuA2qPAo”

@ Grant: “To reiterate, all the talk of [w00t] coming from “root” is unverified. Besides the lack of evidence, R to W transitions in l33t are exceedingly unusual, so “root” to “woot” is unlikely.”

Yeah, but Elmer Fudd was “hunting wabbits,” and if there’s something a hacker is MORE likely to be associated with than the dance scene, it’s Looney Tunes.

Just a conjecture…

> To reiterate, all the talk of [w00t] coming from
> “root” is unverified. Besides the lack of
> evidence, R to W transitions in l33t are
> exceedingly unusual, so “root” to “woot” is
> unlikely.

Actually, based on my experience in the early ‘net community, it was not uncommon to poke fun at hackers.  The earliest explanation I was given (c.1991) was that “woot” was short for “woo! root!”—as in “I finally achieved root access on a machine”.

At far as a proper etymological survey, I don’t think anyone’s done it; your ideas about the relationship to the “whoop! there it is” phenom are interesting, but not exactly scholarly.  I’d really like to see some proper scholarship on the matter.

“In Middle English, woot was used as another form of to know.” (Wikipedia, http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/woot). I am brining this here just to make a point regarding timeframe, in which any research is supposed to be conducted. So, when I mentioned 1945 previously, it was just a first-step approach, indicating that 1990th could not be possibly the right time-slot for coinage of the term. I also made a statement supporting Grant Barrett’s song-derivation hypothesis as the most plausible theory in terms of historical tracing. But this did not mean that research had been completed. Everyone, including producer of “Woot! Here it is”, were in admission of the fact that the term was “floating around” for anyone to pick it up and use. So, we have to name Jacksonville, FL, as a proper place for further digging. Grant Barrett and [wes] both indicated Atlanta, GA (?) as well. Everyone also has the Net as the ubiquitous resource for surfing and sifting. But, again, it is not necessarily that the true proof and evidence should be found on-line. Such suggestions, of course, make those proud souls of plowmen on the hacking field somewhat uncomfortable. Referring to Russian adage, I might say that “there is nothing new that would not be well-forgotten something really old.” But one could put me in the awkward state of mind by quoting “there is nothing new under the sun” (NIV, Ecc 1:9).
There are more programming languages than natural ones. In the early times of the computational revolution nobody would even think that talking in Hexadecimal-Object-Code is a good idea. Instead, they were trying to make computer languages more humane. Although those languages still are not spoken, it is possible to write a program, which, besides its direct purpose, might carry sensible message in the body of instructional statements. Nowadays, some guys are playing different games, trying to make natural written languages as much unrecognizable as possible (leetspeak = l33t). The mere possibility of toying with languages in such way, not to mention the hackers’ affinity to it, comes from the programming languages themselves. Among other thing, good programming language includes mechanism for self-extension. The entire vocabulary as well as syntax could be re-defined beyond recognition. Familiar words might acquire different meaning and the new terms could inherit significance of existing ones. Moreover, it does not matter whether “woot” came from Middle English, from veterans of WWII, from Russian-speaking population of Florida, or from the song “Woot! Here it is”. If this did not happen yesterday, there certainly would be enough time for expropriating the word tomorrow by a simple action of assigning to it a new meaning. And why not? Beginning of Christianity was marked by the new interpretation of the Old Testament. Two thousand years later the process of re-interpretation is still strong and sound. The problem with hackers though is that “history” could be redefined as well, going in opposite direction…

Damn, you guys are blasted..

The sound “w00t!” represents the goddamn steam-flutes /horns on a goddamn ship; - the ones depicted in cartoons as stone-faced breathing mouths, (you know..) - goddamn steamboat “horns”.

So, in the context of ‘expression,’ “w00t!!!111” adds on to it like a “breakpoint"/"milestone" pointifier; - simply like an “Eureka!!![111]”, or whatever you wish to compare it with; - a goddamn expression, in any case..

*sigh* - the art of complicating things with nonesense.. ;)

I just found that the word “W00t: (that expression of joy invented by gamers way back when Sonic and Tails were special friends) has been given the accolade of word of the year by Webster’s dictionary. This word is jut so popular that, it would become |in the webmaster world| like |Nike | for ordinary people.

Ever heard of the Disco Call? This was popular back in the 70’s. “Woot woot!” I believe this would take it back before “r00t” or “Whoot, there it is”. It is used as a call of excitement in night clubs. For an example, listen to Foxy’s “Get Off” as early as 1978.

Nice try, Jonathan C.,

Get Off - lyrics:

Ooh, ooh, ooh
Ooh, ooh, ooh
Ooh, ooh, oooooooh

Yeah
Get off

Music may ease and end all discretion
So we can get off
We keep under the sheets with two lovelys
So we can get off

Said I hope that we get the promise, ladies
And make me get off
Take it from girls with our imagination
So we can get off

Call me up at your place
I can love you crazy
In the heat you will understand
Danger and excitement
That’s what makes a lady
Find out what she wants in a man

To get off, get off, to get off, to get off
To get off, to get off, to get off, to get, get off

Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh
Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh
Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, oooooooh

Lookin’ through that dress that drive me crazy
And makes me get off
Sensuality excites my mind, it makes get off
If I were you I’d get a good perspective
On how to get off
Love me wild and love me crazy
So we can get off

Call me up at your place
I can love you crazy
In the heat you will understand
Danger and excitement
That’s what makes a lady
Find out what she wants in a man

To get off, to get off, to get off, to get off
To get off, to get off, to get off, to get, get off

Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh
Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, oooooooh

Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh
Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh
Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, oooooooh

Lookin’ through that dress that drive me crazy
And makes me get off
Sensuality excites my mind, it makes get off
If I were you I’d get a good perspective (for sure)
On how to get off
Love me wild and love me crazy
So we can get off

Call me up at your place
I can love you crazy
In the heat you will understand
Danger and excitement
That’s what makes a lady
Find out what she wants in a man

To get off, to get off, to get off, to get off
To get off, to get off, to get off, to get, get off

Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh
Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, oooooooh

Get off

So get off, to get off, to get off, to get, get off
Get off to get off, to get off, get off
So get off, get off, to get off, to get, get off
Get off to get off, get off, get off

To get off, to get off, to get off, to get, get off
Get off, get off, get off, to get off
Get off to get off, get off, get, get off
Get off, get off, so get off, just get off
Get off, get off, get off

Perhaps, this would be much closer:

Hot number

Hot number

Hot number woo woo

I want to be a hot number

Hot number

Hot number woooooo wooo-oooh

Hot number hoo hoo
[Hot Number Lyrics on
http://www.lyricsmania.com/ ]

But still, far away from whoot whoot…

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