Word.ws English Dictionary

boo-hooray

boo-hooray adjective: having no meaning beyond the emotional reaction of the speaker; emotivist.

Adjective

boo-hooray (comparative more boo-hooray, superlative most boo-hooray)

  1. Having no meaning beyond the emotional reaction of the speaker; emotivist.
    • When I first came to the House of Commons I did not understand the legal use of the term " reasonable," which seemed to me a value judgment and to fall into the " boo-hooray " school.1968, Great Britain. Parliament. House of Commons, Official Report of the Standing Committees
    • It need not be a non-operational, merely 'boo-hooray' expression.1978, Tony Becher, Stuart Maclure, Accountability in Education, page 76

Forms of boo-hooray

comparativemore boo-hooray
superlativemost boo-hooray

Origin of boo-hooray

A reference to the interjections boo and hooray which provide no information beyond the emotional reaction of the speaker.

Questions about boo-hooray

What does boo-hooray mean?
Boo-hooray means having no meaning beyond the emotional reaction of the speaker; emotivist.
What part of speech is boo-hooray?
Boo-hooray is an adjective.

Words near boo-hooray in the dictionary

  1. boo-hag
  2. boo-hags
  3. boo-hoo
  4. boo-hooed
  5. boo-hooing
  6. boo-hooray
  7. boo-hoos
  8. boo-womp
  9. boo-ya
  10. booable
  11. boob

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: boo-hooray (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “boo-hooray.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/boo-hooray. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.