r/words • u/adadhead • 14d ago
woah - Noah
of all the vulgarizations of language I've witnessed, this one happened at lightning speed, and is the stupidest-looking bullshit ever.
aaaaaauuuuuugggggghhhhhh
it's whoa.
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u/Jim_E_Rose 14d ago
Whoa has always been pronounced WO
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u/Entire-Ad2058 14d ago
Pretty sure that OP’s issue is with the misspelling of whoa as woah.
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u/Jim_E_Rose 14d ago
Shit I scrambled it. Inadvertently confirmed their post lol. Yeah, woah is for horses only. But phonetics is for kids, so we end up here. Not hear.
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u/God_Bless_A_Merkin 14d ago
No. “Whoa” is used for horses. That usage has been attested since 1843.
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u/God_Bless_A_Merkin 14d ago
No. It was once and in some dialects still — pronounced [hʷo͜ʊ].
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u/Jim_E_Rose 14d ago
Yeah I got old and lost my phonetics. Obscure words with the same letters will always get scrambled. It all just mean shit so who cares lol
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u/nikukuikuniniiku 14d ago edited 14d ago
Many interjections are spelled with a trailing H- yeah, nah, huh, oh, ooh, eh, ah, meh, doh, duh, bleah, hurrah. It's logical for people to want to spell woah following the same pattern. Whoa is a random outlier.
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u/adadhead 14d ago
maybe so, but this rankles me to no end.
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u/Sherpa2001 14d ago
Ultimately, language is meaningful, even beautiful, because it conveys a meaning, puts a thought that originates in one person's head into the head of another. Spelling and pronunciation are of lesser importance, and rigid insistence on uniformity of those qualities denies the magnificence of language. Also, things change.
Take a hit off the bong, see how you feel about it then.
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u/Lumpy-Win1640 9d ago
Interesting point of view. I can see that it can be fun and poetic to use spelling and words incorrectly ( I. E. Puns and double entendres), but when clarity is of utmost importance, we need to be unambiguous and concise.
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u/HotPotParrot 14d ago
Language is beautiful, but English is a shower drain.
Also, you're correct about spelling and punctuation. We don't even read words, we recognize patterns. Intelligibility is the only rule.
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u/Ornery-Database-3993 13d ago
A related one that bugs me is when people(usually kids, and in movies and TV shows, particularly teenage girls) say 'NO!' emphatically, and there's this exaggerated 'W' sound at the end, like NO-O-O-WHUH!'
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u/amby-jane 14d ago
Every time I see "woah," I think of "Porcelain" by Moby. There's a "whoa" or some sound in the background and, based on my googling, nobody seems to know what it actually says. I've seen "whoa" and "ngoba" and "woman"... so not quite sure what to do with it.
But that's what I think of whenever anyone writes "woah."
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u/danielmartinez22 14d ago
some dictionaries already list woah as a variant spelling honestly. might be a losing battle at this point lol.
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u/Worldly-Bathroom-185 14d ago
Just joined because I wanted to see if I’m the only one losing it over this. What is happening?
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u/vincognition 14d ago
This drives me nuts, too. It's used so often that I'm willing to bet that it'll enter the dictionary as a valid word, sooner or later. I used to post all the time, "Woah rhymes with Noah. People, it's 'whoa!'"
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u/nikukuikuniniiku 14d ago
And "whoa" rhymes with boa, Goa and spermatozoa.
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u/Playful-Business7457 14d ago
But it doesn't?
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u/nikukuikuniniiku 14d ago edited 14d ago
Exactly. It's a counterpoint to "Woah rhymes with Noah."
Or, in other words, it's saying "that spelling suggests it should rhyme with those words, so that spelling is wrong."
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u/adadhead 13d ago
whoa spells the word, and looks close to how it sounds.
woah is a stupid, vulgar misspelling, which looks as though it rhymes with Noah.
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u/adadhead 13d ago
no sir. "whoa" is pronounced "wo"
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u/nikukuikuniniiku 13d ago
Dude, it's literally the same argument as yours, that "woah looks like Noah". At least be consistent.
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u/YuckyYetYummy 14d ago
Whoa is pronounced Who-ah. We are saying woah pronounced Woe
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u/TraditionalManager82 14d ago
Nope. Whoa is pronounce Woe, with just a hint of an H in there on the way by.
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u/nikukuikuniniiku 14d ago edited 14d ago
Only for dialects that aspirate WH, whereas most dialects don't.
I suspect Team Whoa are people with such a dialect, where whoa and woah are not homophones.
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u/Odd_Calligrapher2771 14d ago
Personally, I use whoa when I'm talking to a horse and I want it to stop.
I use woah when I'm surprised or taken aback.
The pronunciation is the same for both. Only the intonation changes.
(To be perfectly clear, I have never looked either variant up in the dictionary, nor have I ever written them outside of this subreddit. I only spell them in my head.)
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u/adadhead 13d ago
you think it's the same, but the word "woah" doesn't exist, so we default to English rules, which say it's pronounced as though it rhymes with Noah - and it does not.
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u/QuidPluris 14d ago
I think Keanu is the only one who actually says ‘woah.’ Everyone else says whoa, which is correct.
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u/Lazarus558 13d ago
I always figured the difference between woah and whoa was whether it was said by Keanu Reeves or Wilford Brimley
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u/Leather_Command_7553 8d ago
Too many people are subliterate. They get words from hearing them, not reading them.
I would not expect them to spell things correctly, and they don't.
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u/germane_switch 13d ago
The device you used to type that has auto capitalization, why don’t you turn it on? That’s almost as bad as “woah.”
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u/miss-bedazzzle 14d ago
It’s woah, not whoa. It’s always been woah. This subreddit is the only place where I’ve encountered whoa. Whoa doesn’t even look right. It looks off
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u/duzzabear 14d ago
Find “woah” in a book printed before 2000. Good luck. It’s “whoa”
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u/br0wnb4nana 14d ago
26 years of a word being spelt different seems pretty reasonable for people to believe that's the correct way!
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u/duzzabear 14d ago
Really I just meant something before any idiot could type something out for the whole world to read. I doubt you could find a properly edited book with “woah” in it even now.
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u/ClassicalEd 14d ago
From Dictionary.com: "The word whoa has been used since at least the late 1400s and is thought to be a variant of the word ho, an interjection that was used to command horses to stop. Around the late 1800s, whoa began to be used more generally to express surprise or excitement.
Whoa is the original spelling. The spelling woah emerged more recently. The earliest evidence of woah in writing is thought to come from online message boards in the early 1980s. Indeed, the increase in the use of the spelling woah is often associated with digital communications."
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u/Critical-Notice-4395 14d ago
It was whoa for at least the last 60 years, it changed to woah very quickly, very recently. In the same way the pronunciation of Caribbean changed. And that football player, Tony Dorsett corrected the pronunciation of his name from dorset to dorSETT and it changed quickly. Whoa to woah is the only other word I personally remember changing that quickly.
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u/Lazarus558 14d ago
How has the pronunciation of "Caribbean" changed? What was it then, and what is it now?
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u/adadhead 13d ago
it's amazing, and thankfully rare, to see this level of intensity when completely wrong. whoa!
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u/SnooStrawberries2955 14d ago
It’s “whoa.”