Word.ws English Dictionary

tooraloo

tooraloo interjection: goodbye.

Interjection

tooraloo

  1. (Australia, Ireland) Goodbye.
    • So long! See you soon! Too-ra-loo!c. 1921, D.H. Lawrence, Phoenix II
    • —Toraloo, Lenehan said. See you later.1922 February 2, James Joyce, Ulysses, Paris: Shakespeare and Company […], →OCLC
  2. Variation of tura-lura.
    • Here, a lark sprang up at his feet and darted into the air with its thrilling rush of exquisite moldy.―“Faith, you’ve given me my answer sure enough, my purty lark—that’s as much as to say, they may go whistle for them—oh, my poor fellows, how I pity yiz;”―and here he broke into a “too ra lal loo”...1837, Samuel Lover, “The Burial of the Tithe”, Legends and Stories of Ireland, series 2, Baldwin and Cradock, page 68

Verb

tooraloo (third-person singular simple present tooraloos, present participle tooralooing, simple past and past participle tooralooed)

  1. To express as in song.
    • His light and Gallic spirits underwent a sudden, miraculous change. He hummed a blithe San Salvador Opera Company tune; he grinned, smirked, bowed, pirouetted, twiddled, twaddled, twisted, and tooralooed. Gayly, the notorious troubadour, could not have equalled Étienne.1917, William Sydney Porter, “The snow man”, in Waifs and strays, Doubleday, page 115
    • George was sitting in his shirt-sleeves among his pigeons; snow-white creatures that tooralooed and paced and ducketed on the gravel about his feet, while two of their fellows cooed love secrets into his ear.1955, Walter de la Mare, A Beginning and Other Stories, Faber & Faber, page 97

Forms of tooraloo

third-person singular presenttooraloos
present participletooralooing
past participletooralooed
pasttooralooed

Questions about tooraloo

What does tooraloo mean?
Tooraloo means goodbye.
What part of speech is tooraloo?
Tooraloo can be an interjection or a verb.

Words near tooraloo in the dictionary

  1. toora loora
  2. Toora North
  3. Tooradin
  4. Toorak
  5. tooral looral
  6. tooraloo
  7. Tooran
  8. Tooranian
  9. Tooranie
  10. Tooraweenah
  11. Toorbal

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: tooraloo (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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