Gosh

How to spell gosh

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce gosh

What does gosh mean?

1. interjectionA mild exclamation expressing surprise, mild dismay, or emphasis, used as a polite substitute for stronger language.

Gosh in a sentence

• Gosh, the repair bill came to far more than the estimate.

• Oh gosh, the train leaves in three minutes and the platform is miles away.

Where does gosh come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Gosh is what language historians call a minced oath: a deliberately altered version of a word people felt nervous about saying aloud. In this case the underlying word is God, and from the middle of the 1700s English speakers began swapping the divine name for a harmless near-sound so they could express surprise without taking the name of the Lord in vain. The same impulse produced a whole family of polite substitutes, including golly, gosh-darn, and the exclamation by gum. Because it was coined for the sound rather than for any meaning, gosh has no Latin or Greek root to trace; it is simply God with its ending blunted into a soft 'sh'. That casual origin is also why it stays short and phonetic, ending in a single sh that catches some writers who expect a longer or fancier spelling.

How the word is built

• gosh (a softened alteration of the word God, with no internal prefix or suffix)