There’s room in any dictionary for all parts of speech, and if the amount of mail sent by interested word buffs is any indication, woot—an interjection or exclamation of celebration or revelry—is a favorite.

It comes in a variety of spellings offline and on. The most common, woot, whoot, and w00t are, for our purposes, variations of the same lexical item, especially since the aspirated aitch is growing less common in American English. The latter variant, w00t, has two zeroes in place of ohs, a common characteristic of words originating from online entertainment, especially in multiplayer games, where goofy and ironic l33tspeak sometimes prevails. Other online variations are w00+ and w007.

As is the case for most words, the most popular question about woot is “Where did it come from?” Unfortunately, its origins are disputed and, also like most words, it’s impossible to say with any certainty what the true origins are. Trying to come close to the term’s roots is a game of odds, Occam’s razor, and believability.

After a couple of examples of “whoot” or “woot” as an onomatopoeic representation of video game sounds in news stories from 1982, the earliest clear-cut use of the word found so far is in the name of the Atlantic City, N.J., entertainment tabloid The Whoot! which shows up in 1988 as a sponsor of the ugliest bartender contest in Philadelphia. In 2003 The Whoot! changed its name to the Atlantic City Weekly. Current AC Weekly editor Michael Epifanio says that The Whoot was so-named by founder Lew Steiner after “night owls who would pull all-nighters to scout out the bars, clubs and restaurants and then send the publication out to print.”

Other unlikely origins for the term have been proposed. In discussing the web site of consumer-electronics retailer Woot.com, a 2004 story in Ad Age claimed that the word originated of the phrase “Wow! loot” in the role-playing board game Dungeons and Dragons. The game, created in 1973 and released to the public in 1974, is unlikely as a point of origin. The Ad Age article (besides other sources referring to it) is the only source so far found that connects the word to the term in more than 30 years of the game’s existence. Given the popularity of D&D in the Eighties, it should have, by all rights, showed up in connection with the term woot long before 2004.

A related claim is that it came from multiplayer online games like Everquest and Ultima Online where it is said to have been associated with the phrase “wondrous loot,” or even with the same “wow, loot!” as in D&D, when a player’s character came across gold or wealth in the game. It’s also been credited to the online game Quake, where it is said to have been associated with the sound a player’s avatar makes when it jumps. While it is entirely possible that these games, which had tens of thousands of registered users, could have helped popularize the term, the first written evidence for woot occurred well before these games existed. Quake, the oldest of the three, was first released in 1996.

Another—and, frankly, halfhearted—claim, is that it comes from the Scottish interjection “hoot!” There is indeed such an interjection, according to the Dictionary of the Scots Language, and in various forms it dates as far back as 1698, appearing in such notable works as Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novel Kidnapped. The problem here, though, is that the Scots hoot! is negative. It’s not a crowing comment of satisfaction and delight, it’s “an exclamation used to express annoyance, disgust, incredulity or remonstrance or in dismissal of an opinion expressed by someone else,” the same as tut! or fie! While such inversions of meaning are not unheard of—nice essentially reversed its meaning over 600 years, going from meaning “silly or foolish” to “pleasant, kind, or neat in appearance”—they are not common and, like nice, take a long time. From the first citation the DSL has in 1698 to the latest in 1933, the Scots hoot shows no signs of changing.

More implausible as the origin is the backronym We Own(ed) the Other Team, also said to come from use in unnamed multiplayer video games. A backronym is a word interpreted as an acronym after that word has already been around a while. We know the word existed before the phrase because the phrase doesn’t show up in online discussions groups until March 2003. The longer phrase easily could have existed in multiplayer game chatter before then, but in general, once a term is popular in game chatter, it quickly also shows up in web and Usenet discussions related to the game, which is not the case here.

Elsewhere woot is claimed to come from root, the user name given in Unix-based operating systems to the administrator’s account. This lacks any supporting evidence at all, except for dubious claims of “I remember,” and is rebuffed here for the sake of completeness.

The most likely explanation, as is usually the case, is far simpler. Woot is, with some caveats, probably derived from and most likely popularized by the dance catch phrase of 1993, “whoot, there it is!” In clubs and on dance floors across the country, in half-time shows and in baseball stadiums, “whoot, there it is” and plain old “woot!” were shouted long and loud by millions. It was used by hype men at hip-hop shows, dancers and cheerleaders at ball games, DJs at discos, and probably by ball-callers at bingos.

If woot had any kind of real presence before the songs—as something other than the name of the publication from Atlantic City—it has not yet been found. As a clear-cut term of celebration or revelry, it simply did not show up in the trillions of words published before 1993 and current