Dang

How to spell dang

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce dang

What does dang mean?

1. interjectionA mild exclamation of annoyance, surprise, or frustration, used in place of a stronger curse.
2. adjectiveUsed informally before another word to add emphasis, meaning 'very' or 'extremely'.

Dang in a sentence

• interjection

  Dang, the wallet was left on the kitchen counter again.

• adjective

  That mechanic did a dang good job on the brakes.

• interjection

  Dang, that storm came in faster than the forecast said.

• adjective

  The line at the bank was dang long this afternoon.

Where does dang come from?

Language of origin: Latin

Dang is a polite, softened stand-in for the curse word 'damn', and the two are really the same word in disguise. 'Damn' itself comes from the Latin damnare, meaning 'to condemn or to inflict loss upon', which passed into English through Old French in the medieval period. By the late 1700s, mostly in American English, speakers who wanted the force of 'damn' without the offence began swapping its vowel and consonant to produce milder forms such as 'darn' and 'dang'. This kind of deliberate sound-shuffling to avoid a taboo word is called a minced oath, and 'gosh' (for God) and 'heck' (for hell) were created the very same way. Because dang exists only to dodge the original spelling, its own short, blunt form is easy to write; the trap is mostly remembering it ends in -ng rather than -n.

How the word is built

• dang (euphemistic alteration of damn)