whoa

Formswhoas, whoaing, whoaed

1. 1
   interjection

   An exclamation used to express surprise or amazement.

   Whoa, I had no idea the project was already finished.

   Whoa, the view from up here is absolutely incredible.

   Similarwow, gosh

   Note

   Surprise that keeps a trace of the command to halt: the speaker is pulled up short, so the word often comes with a request to pause. Marty McFly's 'Whoa. Wait a minute, Doc' in Back to the Future (1985) shows both at once. It also stands alone as pure astonishment, as when Moss in The IT Crowd stammers, 'How... Whoa!'

2. 2
   interjection

   An exclamation used to command a horse to stop, or to tell a person to slow down or calm down.

   Whoa, slow down before you crash that bike!

   "Whoa there," the rider called, pulling back on the reins.

   Similarsteady

   Oppositegiddyup

   Note

   A call to animals with a long pedigree. The spelling settled around 1843, after wo and woa. Before that it runs back through Middle English ho, and probably to an Old Norse shepherd's call, hó! Speakers use it on people just as easily: doubled, as in Ron Liebman's Death by Rodrigo (2007), 'Whoa, whoa, Mick, not here,' or with a name attached, as in the stock 'Whoa, Nelly!'

3. 3
   verbtransitive

   To attempt to slow or stop an animal by calling out "whoa."

   The driver struggled to whoa the spooked horses as the cart picked up speed.

   He whoaed the mule team to a halt at the edge of the field.

   Similarhalt, stop, check

   Note

   The call itself turned into a verb. The spelling keeps its final -a and simply adds endings: whoas, whoaing, whoaed. The verb names the shout, not its success, so it sits comfortably beside failure. In Josephine Demott Robinson's The Circus Lady (1926), a driver is 'whoaing the horses loudly' while they break into a gallop.

4. 4
   interjection

   A vocable carrying no lexical meaning, sung to fill out a line or hook in a song.

   The hook is built around a catchy "whoa-oh" that the crowd chants back.

   He padded the bridge with a few sustained "whoas" instead of new words.

   Note

   Pure sound, with nothing left to mean. In lyrics it often rides alongside oh, as in Bruce Springsteen's It's a Shame (2010), where the pair opens a line addressed to a girl. It can also close a line to round off the rhythm, as in "Weird Al" Yankovic's eBay (2003), where it caps a line about an auction's final seconds.

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