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Hip hip hooray (also hippity hip hooray; ''hooray'' may also be spelled and pronounced hoorah, hurrah, hurray etc.) is a
cheer Cheering involves the uttering or making of sounds and may be used to encourage, excite to action, indicate approval or welcome. The word cheer originally meant face, countenance, or expression, and came through Old French into Middle English" ...
called out to express congratulation toward someone or something, in the
English-speaking The English-speaking world comprises the 88 countries and territories in which English is an official, administrative, or cultural language. In the early 2000s, between one and two billion people spoke English, making it the largest language ...
world and elsewhere, usually given three times. By a sole speaker, it is a form of
interjection An interjection is a word or expression that occurs as an utterance on its own and expresses a spontaneous feeling, situation or reaction. It is a diverse category, with many different types, such as exclamations ''(ouch!'', ''wow!''), curses (''da ...
. In a group, it takes the form of
call and response Call and response is a form of interaction between a speaker and an audience in which the speaker's statements ("calls") are punctuated by responses from the listeners. This form is also used in music, where it falls under the general category of ...
: the cheer is initiated by one person exclaiming "Three cheers for... omeone or something (or, more archaically, "Three times three"), then calling out "hip hip" (archaically, "hip hip hip") three times, each time being responded by "hooray" or "hurrah". The cheer continues to be used to express congratulations. In Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and to a lesser extent the United Kingdom, the cheer is usually expressed after the singing of "
Happy Birthday to You "Happy Birthday to You", or simply "Happy Birthday", is a song traditionally sung to celebrate a person's birthday. According to the 1998 ''Guinness World Records'', it is the most recognized song in the English language, followed by "For He' ...
". In Canada and the United Kingdom, the cheer has been used to greet and salute the monarch at public events.


History

The call was recorded in England in the beginning of the 19th century in connection with making a toast. Eighteenth century dictionaries list "Hip" as an attention-getting interjection, and in an example from 1790 it is repeated. "Hip-hip" was added as a preparatory call before making a toast or cheer in the early 19th century, probably after 1806. By 1813, it had reached its modern form, hip-hip-hurrah. It has been suggested that the word "hip" stems from a
medieval In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages or medieval period lasted approximately from the 5th to the late 15th centuries, similarly to the post-classical period of World history (field), global history. It began with the fall of the West ...
Latin Latin ( or ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally spoken by the Latins (Italic tribe), Latins in Latium (now known as Lazio), the lower Tiber area aroun ...
acronym An acronym is a type of abbreviation consisting of a phrase whose only pronounced elements are the initial letters or initial sounds of words inside that phrase. Acronyms are often spelled with the initial Letter (alphabet), letter of each wor ...
, "''H''ierosolyma ''E''st ''P''erdita", meaning "Jerusalem is lost", a term that gained notoriety in the German
Hep hep riots The Hep-Hep riots from August to October 1819 were pogroms against Jews, beginning in the Kingdom of Bavaria, during the period of Jewish emancipation in the German Confederation. The antisemitic communal violence began on August 2, 1819, in Würzbu ...
of August to October 1819. Cornell's Michael Fontaine disputes this etymology, tracing it to a single letter in an English newspaper published August 28, 1819, some weeks after the riots. He concludes that the "acrostic interpretation ... has no basis in fact."
Ritchie Robertson Ritchie Neil Ninian Robertson FBA (born 1952) is a British academic who was the Taylor Professor of German Language and Literature between 2010 and 2021. He was educated at Nairn Academy in the North of Scotland and at Edinburgh University, wher ...
also disputes the "folk etymology" of the acronym interpretation, citing
Jacob Katz Jacob Katz (Hebrew: יעקב כ"ץ) (born 15 November 1904 in Magyargencs, Hungary, died 20 May 1998 in Israel) was an acclaimed Jewish historian and educator. Katz described "traditional society" and deployed sociological methods in his study ...
. One theory about the origin of "hurrah" is that the Europeans picked up the Mongol exclamation "hooray" as an enthusiastic cry of bravado and mutual encouragement. See Jack Weatherford's book ''
Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World ''Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World'' (2004) is a history book written by Jack Weatherford, Dewitt Wallace Professor of Anthropology at Macalester College. It is a narrative of the rise and influence of Mongol leader Genghis Khan ...
''.Murphy, Joseph W. (November 21, 2005 )
"Re: Hurray!!!! A Mongol Word?"
Tech-Archive.net. Retrieved February 19, 2013.


See also

*
Huzzah Huzzah (sometimes written hazzah; originally spelled huzza and pronounced , now often pronounced as ; in most modern varieties of English hurrah or hooray) is, according to the ''Oxford English Dictionary'' (''OED''), "apparently a mere excla ...


References

{{reflist English phrases Interjections Etiquette