Whoa

How to spell whoa

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce whoa

What does whoa mean?

1. interjectionAn exclamation used to tell someone or something to stop or slow down, or to express sudden surprise.

Whoa in a sentence

• He yelled whoa as the cart rolled toward the edge of the yard.

• The rider called whoa and the horse came to a steady halt.

Where does whoa come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Whoa began life as a command shouted to a horse to make it stop or slow down, and it is essentially a spelling variant of the older 'who' and 'ho', which were themselves shaped to imitate the sharp, attention-grabbing call a driver gives an animal. The earliest forms appear in English from around the 1600s, and the spelling drifted between 'who', 'whoo', 'ho' and 'wo' before 'whoa' settled in during the 1800s. The added 'w' and silent 'h' mirror the question word 'who', which is why the spelling looks far stranger than the simple long 'o' sound it represents. Over the twentieth century the word broadened well beyond stables: people now use it to slow someone down in conversation or to register sudden astonishment. Because it sounds nothing like the way it is written (the 'wh' and the trailing 'a' are both silent traps), it is one of those small words that confident adults still pause over.

How the word is built

• whoa (interjection; a later spelling variant of 'who' / 'ho', not built from prefix or suffix)

Words that sound like whoa

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• woe: Great sorrow, grief, or a cause of misfortune and distress.