Emo

How to spell emo

3 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce emo

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does emo mean?

1. nounA style of guitar music marked by confessional, emotional lyrics, and the youth subculture associated with it.
2. adjectiveRelating to or characteristic of emo music, fashion, or mood.

Emo in a sentence

• noun

  The band built its early following in the emo scene of the late nineties.

• adjective

  The playlist had a distinctly emo feel, full of brooding ballads.

• noun

  His record collection is mostly emo from the early two thousands.

• adjective

  He went through an emo phase with dyed black hair and skinny jeans.

Where does emo come from?

Language of origin: Latin

Emo is a clipping of 'emotional', and it began life inside the American hardcore punk scene of the mid 1980s. Bands in Washington, D.C. played a confessional, feeling-driven style that fans first labelled 'emotional hardcore' and then 'emocore', which was soon shortened again to the snappy 'emo'. The parent word 'emotion' traces back through French to the Latin emovere, literally 'to move out' or 'to stir up', from e- 'out' and movere 'to move', so the genre's name quite fittingly points to music that stirs strong feeling. By the early 2000s the term had broadened beyond music to describe a whole youth subculture, with its dark fringed haircuts, skinny jeans, and introspective mood. Because it is simply the first syllable of 'emotional' spelled phonetically, the spelling holds no real surprises.

How the word is built

• emo (clipped from 'emotional', itself emotion
• -al)