napoo
napoo adjective: finished, dead, no more, gone; non-existent.
Adjective
napoo (not comparable)
- Finished, dead, no more, gone; non-existent.
- What shall I do? / My poor old dug-out is napoo.1918 April, 'R', An elegy on my dugout, when it was done in, published in Four Whistles by D Company of the Scottish Officer Cadet Battalion, quoted in Graham Seal, The Soldiers' Press: Trench...
- “[…] It seems scrounging for fuel ’ad reached such a pitch in the village […] But our washing ’ad to be done, ’an I thought if I got the whole of this football team scrounging they might find something as everyone else ’ad overlooked.[…]” / “‘Very well,’ says I, ‘San fairy ann. Napoo washing—napoo...1920 March 10, “Won on the Posts. (With the British Army in France.)”, in Punch, or The London Charivari, volume CLVIII, London: […] Bradbury, Agnew & Co., […], →OCLC, page 185, column 1
- Dead.
- ‘Hey, Bill, where′s Charles?’ / ‘Napoo.’ / ‘What?’ / ‘Yes. He was out on a listening post and lit a cigarette. Sniper got him.’1918, Hereward Carrington, Psychical Phenomena and the War, page 69
Verb
napoo (third-person singular simple present napoos, present participle napooing, simple past and past participle napooed)
- To finish; to put an end to; to kill.
- He will napoo the rations.
- “The general says that if you are wise you will leave before the cannons come. Otherwise you′ll get ‘napooed,’ ” and he made an expressive gesture. “Compris?”1918, Roland Pertwee, The Little Landscape: Everybody′s Magazine, volume 38, page 35
Interjection
- There is no more.
- “[…]Finish! Napoo!” and he spread his hands expressively, holding the cup upside down with the cloth hanging out of it, before he went on: “But it hasn't come to that yet.[…]”1939, Ruthven Todd, Over the Mountain, published 1978, page 216
Examples of napoo in a sentence
- One afternoon the corps was due to shift, so that morning the cook said to the Turco, giving him his farewell tin: 'Oh la, la, Johnny, napoo pozzy tomorrow.'1929 November, Robert Graves, chapter XVII, in Good-bye to All That: An Autobiography, London: Jonathan Cape […], →OCLC, page 237:
- The war was napoo, fini, and the Rhine the end of the journey.1964, Pierre van Paassen, To Number Our Days, page 159:
- I thought a man was lucky if he did not get napooed first trip in.1918, Hereward Carrington, Psychical Phenomena and the War, page 68:
- German planes had not only carried out a raid behind our lines, but a long-range shell had actually hit one of the Battalion cookers and “napooed” it completely.1988, Sidney Rogerson, Twelve days, page 19:
Forms of napoo
| Verb | |
|---|---|
| third-person singular present | napoos |
| present participle | napooing |
| past participle | napooed |
| past | napooed |
| Interjection | |
| alternative form | narpoo |
Origin of napoo
World War I British and ANZAC army slang, probably a corruption of French “il n′y a plus” (“there is no more”).
Questions about napoo
- What does napoo mean?
- Napoo means finished, dead, no more, gone; non-existent.
- How do you use napoo in a sentence?
- One afternoon the corps was due to shift, so that morning the cook said to the Turco, giving him his farewell tin: 'Oh la, la, Johnny, napoo pozzy tomorrow.'
- What part of speech is napoo?
- Napoo can be an adjective, a verb or an interjection.
Words near napoo in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: napoo (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: “napoo.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/napoo. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.