Origin and history of oh

oh(interj.)

interjection expressing various emotions (fearsurprisepaininvocationgladnessadmirationetc.)1530sfrom Middle English ofrom Old French ôoh or directly from Latin ooh; a common Indo-European interjection (compare Greek ō; Old Church Slavonic and Lithuanian o; Irish ochOld Irish a; Sanskrit a). But it is not found in Old English (which had ea and translated Latin oh with la or eala) or the older Germanic languages except those that probably borrowed it from Greek or Latin.

The present tendency is to restrict oh to places where it has a certain independence& prefer o where it is proclitic or leans forward upon what follows .... [Fowler]

Often extended for emphasisas in Ohbabya stock saying from c. 1918; ohboy (by 1917); ohyeah (1924). Reduplicated form oh-oh as an expression of alarm or dismay is attested from 1944 (as uh-oh by 1935). Oh-so "so very" (often sarcastic or ironic) is by 1916. Oh yeah? "really? Is that so?" is attested from 1930.

also from 1530s

Entries linking to oh

fifteenth letter of the alphabetfrom a character that in Phoenician was called 'ain (literally "eye") and represented "a very peculiar and to us unpronounceable guttural" [Century Dictionary]. The Greeks also lacked the soundso when they adopted the Phoenician letters they arbitrarily changed O's value to a vowel. (Thus there is no grounds for the belief that the form of the letter represents the shape of the mouth in pronouncing it.) The Greeks later added a special character for "long" O (omega)and the original became "little o" (omicron).

In Middle English and later colloquial useo or o' can be an abbreviation of on or ofand is still literary in some words (o'clockJack-o'-lanterntam-o'-shantercat-o'-nine-tailswill-o'-the-wispetc.).

O' the common prefix in Irish surnames is from Irish óua (Old Irish auui) "descendant."

The "connective" -o- is the usual connecting vowel in compounds taken or formed from Greekwhere it often is the vowel in the stem. "[I]t is affixednot only to terms of Greek originbut also to those derived from Latin (Latin compounds of which would have been formed with the L. connecting or reduced thematic vowel-i)especially when compounds are wanted with a sense that Latin compositioneven if possiblewould not warrantbut which would be authorized by the principles of Greek composition." [OED]

As "zero" in Arabic numerals it is attested from c. 1600from the similarity of shape. Similarly the O blood type (1926) was originally "zero," denoting the absence of A and B agglutinogens.

As a gauge of track in model railroadsby 1905. For o as an interjection of fearsurprisejoyetc.see oh. For use as a colloquial or slang suffixsee -o.

oho(interj.)

exclamation expressing surprisec. 1400from o (see oh) + ho (interj.).

ow(interj.)

14c. as an exclamation of surprise; by 1895 as an expression of sudden pain. Compare oh ah ouch.

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