yahoo
interjection
(an exclamation used to express joy, excitement, etc.)
yahoo
1 American
[yah-hoo]
/ ˈjɑˈhu /
interjection
Yahoo
2
American
[yah-hoo, yey-, yah-hoo]
/ ˈjɑ hu, ˈjeɪ-, jɑˈhu /
noun
-
Yahoos
plural
-
(in Swift'sGulliver's Travels ) one of a race of brutes, having the form and all the vices of humans, who are subject to the Houyhnhnms.
-
(lowercase) an uncultivated or boorish person; lout; philistine; yokel.
-
(lowercase) a coarse or brutish person.
yahoo
British
/ jəˈhuː /
noun
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Nouns
Etymology
Origin of yahoo1
First recorded in 1975–80; of imitative origin
Origin of Yahoo2
Coined by Swift in Gulliver's Travels (1726)
Explanation
Have you ever heard people talk insultingly about uneducated, uncultured country folks? They probably referred to them as yahoos. If someone calls you a yahoo, it's definitely an insult. Yahoos are thought to have very little education and culture. People think of yahoos as folks who were raised in a barn — maybe literally. A yahoo can also be called a bumpkin, hayseed, hick, rube, yokel, or hillbilly. You can't really be a yahoo if you're from a big city. So if you want to insult someone from New York, you'll need to find a different word.
Vocabulary lists containing yahoo
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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.
See Examples For:
Second, Alaskans can’t afford to send any old yahoo to Congress for trolling purposes; the state is heavily dependent on federal money and needs someone deft at bringing home the bacon.
From Slate ● Apr. 9, 2022
Back on 1, Lee Westwood cracks the opening drive of match three down the middle, refusing to follow the advice of the yahoo who cried “Get in the bunker!”
From The Guardian ● Sep. 24, 2021
Her father, meanwhile, “was this, as he put it, yahoo from Missouri,” Ms. Sifton told the San Diego Reader.
From Washington Post ● Dec. 21, 2019
“My mother was extremely English in a high Oxonian way, and my father was this, as he put it, yahoo from Missouri,” Sifton recalled in 2003 in an interview with the weekly San Diego Reader.
From Seattle Times ● Dec. 13, 2019
“Some yahoo pulled up to the wrong gate. There’s not supposed to be anyone at that gate until the Cleveland flight at nine thirty.”
From "Found" by Margaret Peterson Haddix
Cleveland Fed President Beth Hammack takes part in a Yahoo Finance interview at 3 p.m.
From MarketWatch ● Aug. 10, 2026
Chen Chaohui, the company’s founder and CEO, described it as “a pet TikTok” to Yahoo Finance, though one hopes pets will be spared the A.I.-generated fruit videos currently plaguing human users.
From Slate ● Jun. 20, 2026
A second cluster went to phone and tech providers such as AT&T and Verizon and email, cloud and messaging services including Google, WhatsApp and Yahoo.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 16, 2026
The company's valuation puts it within striking range of Microsoft, currently worth $2.92 trillion, according to Yahoo Finance.
From Barron's ● Jun. 16, 2026
The Yahoo mail page was minimized, next to a page about college basketball.
From "Americanah" by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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
There is certainly humor in "Gulliver," especially in the chapters about the Yahoos, where the horses are represented as the superior beings, and disgusted at the filthiness of the creatures in human shape.
From The Function of the Poet and Other Essays by James Russell Lowell
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.
