Monday, 22 October 2012

[identity profile] green-grrl.livejournal.com
Reader [livejournal.com profile] carodee wanted to know: Which is the correct spelling: whoa or woah?

I was pretty firmly in the camp of whoa when I got this question. My New Oxford American Dictionary doesn't list woah at all, and under whoa it says:
used as a command to a horse to make it stop or slow down
[informal] used as a greeting, to express surprise or interest, or to command attention
And the Corpus of Historical American English—which tracks language usage through magazines, newspapers, and fiction and nonfiction books—lists 911 uses of whoa in published sources versus ten of woah.

Seems pretty conclusive, right? Well, it wouldn't be a post if that was the end of the story. )

Profile

fandom_grammar: (Default)
Fandom Grammar

December 2017

S M T W T F S
     12
3456789
10 111213141516
17181920212223
24252627282930
31      

Most Popular Tags

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Monday, 23 June 2025 11:21