booyah

Booyah is a shout of triumph: “Yes! Nailed it!” You yell it when you win, score or get something exactly right.

What booyah means

It’s pure celebration, the spoken version of a fist pump. Sink a long shot, ace a test, find a parking spot right by the door: booyah. It can be sincere or deliberately cheesy, and the cheesy version is often the funnier one.

Examples

• “Three-pointer at the buzzer. Booyah!”
• “Got the last two concert tickets. Booyah!”
• “He says ‘booyah’ every time he gets a trivia question right, and we’re all exhausted.”

Where it came from

Merriam-Webster’s first known use is 1990, and Dictionary.com dates it to the late 1980s. ESPN anchor Stuart Scott made “Boo-yah!” one of his signature SportsCenter catchphrases, and Wikipedia credits him with popularizing the word well beyond sports.

A younger generation picked it up from Cyborg, whose catchphrase on Cartoon Network’s Teen Titans was “booyah.” You’ll see it spelled booyah, boo-yah or booya.

Related terms

• W: a win.
• LFG: let’s go, hyped.
• Pog: gamer slang for “awesome.”
• Raise the roof: celebrate loudly.

More throwback words are in our 90s slang guide.