Yahoos
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A “yahoo” is an uncouth or uncivilized person.
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
You’re doing all the right stuff by yourself, and you’re among professionals, medical professionals, not Yahoos, and you can still have someone else make a mistake and your life is gone.
From Los Angeles Times • Feb. 13, 2026
Their land is plagued by feral animals known as the Yahoos — which, Gulliver is shocked to learn, have human physical form beneath their fur.
From Nature • Sep. 26, 2017
Those benefits are really only a trademark of the big guys—the Facebooks, Apples, Googles and Yahoos of Silicon Valley.
From Time • Aug. 5, 2015
The American Fairy Tale, Fun House Style Of all the disagreeable species of humanlike beings Jonathan Swift invented in “Gulliver’s Travels,” the Yahoos are the worst and most human of all.
From New York Times • Jun. 27, 2013
My master told me, “there were some qualities remarkable in the Yahoos, which he had not observed me to mention, or at least very slightly, in the accounts I had given of humankind.”
From Gulliver's Travels by Swift, Jonathan
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
