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Keep your English up to date
W00t!
Gavin Dudeney
Now here’s a curious word. You probably didn’t notice but
the middle two characters are numbers, not letters, and
this gives us a clue as to where the word came from
originally – but more of that in a while. So, how does this
word sound to you? Let me say it again... ‘w00t!’ Does it
sound happy? It should do. When the Merriam-Webster
dictionary chose it as their word of the year for 2007, they
described it as ‘expressing joy... similar to the word “yay!”’
The kind of thing you say when you win something, or
when something good happens to you: W00t! I passed all
my exams!
So why are there two zeros in the middle of this
expression? Well, w00t! is widely believed to have
originated in the online gaming community where teams
compete to overcome other teams. Beating another team
means that you ‘own’ them, and from there we get the bacronym (a
phrase constructed after the fact) of ‘we own the other team’.
However, gamers speak another language to the rest of us – they speak
l337 (‘leet’, from ‘elite’) where words are written using different
characters and numbers – just to confuse middle-aged people like me.
So, ‘we own the other team’ becomes ‘woot’ and then is transposed in
l337 to ‘w00t!’. Simple, really.
Keen scholars will find the word ‘woot’ used in Chaucer’s
The Wife of
Bath’s Tale
, meaning ‘to know’, and you’ll also find it in pop songs from
the early nineties and various different online forums, but it is the
gaming usage which has captured the popular imagination. As Merriam-
Webster’s president John Morse points out, ‘it blends whimsy and
technology’.
© British Broadcasting Corporation 2008
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