whoa

I’m gonna tell you something that’ll make you say “Whoa!” …or maybe “Woah!”

If you’re fussy about spelling, you probably winced at seeing woah. If you’re very unfussy about spelling, you might have blinked at seeing whoa. But here’s the thing: among those who nitpick at spelling, one of them is considered absolutely right and the other is considered absolutely wrong, but both spellings have been around for centuries. Either could have prevailed. And neither is the original spelling.

Just to be clear, I’m talking about what you say to make a horse stop, or to make a person stop, or to react to something that is a lot to take. I am not talking about sorrow – that’s woe, as in Woe is me (and no, it is absolutely not Woe is I, it’s the same impersonal verb plus dative that you see in methinks). And, on the other hand, we are not talking about a word John Travolta used in Saturday Night Fever to refer to a sexual professional (you could spell that who-a, but of course usually that -a is written re).

This word, whoa, pronounced the same as “woe” (these days), has been spelled as whoa since about the year 1800, though there do seem to be a few cases of that spelling from earlier. The spelling woah, which seems increasingly popular today (no doubt a sign of the abject failure of modern education, an abject failure that, if we’re to go by the complaints of people who complain about such things, has been ongoing since the 1600s), first shows up in texts in the, uh, 1790s.

Which is not to say they were equally popular the whole time. No, whoa did prevail. But during that time, various published sources also had it as woa, woh, woo, wooh, whoh, and wo. And before either spelling showed up, it was also spelled as whoe, whoo, and who. But before that, there was the earlier word ho, also spelled hoo, hoa, and hoe (speaking of that word Travolta used).

So what the heck? Noah Webster helps us just a little here. In his 1828 American Dictionary of the English Language, he put an entry for ho with the definition “a word used by teamsters in stopping their teams” and the note “This word is pronounced also whō, or hwō.” So, you know, with that “hw” sound that English speakers generally don’t make at all anymore, except occasionally when emphatically saying “What?!” – like you might have done when I said that you could spell this word either way.

OK, OK, I know, if you’re a big ol’ word nerd (as I am, and I have socks that say so), you might find this disturbing. We have spelling for a reason! Yes, yes we do; in fact, we have it for several reasons, and one of those reasons is to help us distinguish who is “properly educated” (socially acceptable) and who is not (socially inferior in a certain way): people write what instead of wut because they know what’s what, and the biggest reason we write who as who even though we’ve said it like “hoo” for ages is to show who’s who.

Look. If spelling were just for purely phonetic purposes, to transcribe what you say, whoa and woah would both be bad. If it were for etymological reasons – to show where the word came from, and believe me, that’s an important influence in English spelling – both spellings would still be bad. If it were both of the preceding but also to help distinguish words that could be spelled the same (from woe on the phonetic side and from hoe and who on the etymological side), we’d still do better with, say, woa. No, spelling is also for the very conservative purpose of displaying tradition, and when you’re displaying tradition, you’re choosing whose tradition is worth displaying, and you’re keeping up the tradition of putting people into a social order, one in which people who write whoa, for instance, are in some way better than people who write woah.

I have never found that spelling is a useful indicator of a person’s worth. But I’m not saying that anything goes or that anything should go. Even if I wanted anything to go, it’s not up to me. And it behooves everyone who writes this word to know what the intended readership will think of the different spellings. Words, like horses, tend to come with riders (sometimes more than one), and when you take the horses you take the riders too – in this case, the social significance. Might as well; social navigation is one of the main reasons we use language. It’s not just for fun that we have many ways of saying the same thing – your choice of “Hello,” “Hi,” or “Hey” depends on who you are, who you’re speaking to (or to whom you are speaking), your relationship, and the context. And “gonna” is pointedly more casual and engaging than the basic “going to.”

Anyway, whoa is still very well entrenched. In the Corpus of Contemporary American English, published instances of whoa outnumber instances of woah by more than 100 to 1. On the other hand, in the Corpus of Global Web-Based English, instances of whoa outnumber instances of woah by less than 3 to 1. So, uh, change in progress? Might be. But before you whoa the language on this…

What? Whoa isn’t a verb? Huh. Actually, it’s been used as a verb since the later 1800s, but this raises an important point: in the main, this word is an exclamation, a phatic usage, a sound people make not as part of a sentence but as a whole utterance issuing forth on a wave of feeling. It’s in the same class as the British phwoar (also spelled a whole bunch of other ways), which expresses a surge of sexual desire in response to seeing someone, and the North American whoo (also spelled woo and wooh and wooooooo), which expresses “Partyyyyyyyy!” When you’re in the throes of a crucial instant, not only is spelling not the most essential thing, infractions of spelling are a good way to signify the intensity of the moment (see also teh, pwn, and hodl!!111!!1!).

Taken that way, whoa is something a staid, genteel person can say and write. But woah means you mean it – and to hell with pedantry!