Geez

How to spell geez

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce geez

What does geez mean?

1. interjectionA mild exclamation of surprise, exasperation, or dismay, used as a softened substitute for a stronger oath.

Geez in a sentence

• Geez, the rent has gone up again this quarter.

• Geez, that traffic took nearly two hours to clear.

Where does geez come from?

Language of origin: Other

Geez is a minced oath, a polite reshaping of the name Jesus used to express surprise, annoyance, or dismay without saying the sacred name outright. It arose in American English in the early twentieth century, where speakers softened exclamations like 'Jesus!' into milder-sounding forms to avoid blasphemy. The same impulse produced the related cries 'gee' and 'jeez', and geez is essentially a spelling variant that captures the drawn-out vowel of the word as it is shouted. Because it began as spoken slang rather than a written term, its spelling never fully settled, which is why 'geez', 'jeez', and 'geeze' all circulate today. The single most useful thing to remember is that the soft 'j' sound here is written with a hard-looking 'g', a leftover hint of the J in its parent word Jesus.

How the word is built

• Single-morpheme interjection; a clipped, euphemistic reshaping of the name Jesus (no separable prefix, root, or suffix)