Gaga

How to spell gaga

4 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce gaga

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does gaga mean?

1. adjectiveWildly excited about or infatuated with someone or something, often to an irrational degree.
2. adjectiveMentally confused or behaving in a foolish, addled way.

Gaga in a sentence

• Investors went gaga over the new technology stock.

• After a sleepless week with the newborn, he felt almost gaga.

• The whole office was gaga about the latest phone release.

• The constant noise from the building site was driving her gaga.

Where does gaga come from?

Language of origin: French

This word came into English from French in the early twentieth century, borrowed from the colloquial French adjective gaga, which meant 'senile', 'foolish', or 'in one's dotage'. The French term itself is a reduplication, the simple repetition of a single nonsense syllable, a pattern languages often use for childlike or babbling sounds. That babbling quality is no accident: the doubled 'ga' imitates the unformed noises of a baby or of someone whose speech has lost its sharpness, which is why the same idea attached to both infancy and old-age confusion. English speakers adopted it around the 1910s and 1920s, first in the sense of mental decline and soon in the breezier sense of being giddily infatuated or wildly enthusiastic, as in going gaga over something. Because the word is a tidy mirror image of itself, the spelling is unusually easy: whatever you put before the hyphenless join, you simply repeat.

How the word is built

• ga
• ga (reduplication of a single playful syllable)