There some words out there that we use all the time, but when it comes to actually spelling them, our brains just say "whoa." Or is is "whoah"?
As you likely surmised, we're thinking about "whoa" and why it can be so confusing to spell. That's thanks to our listener Annette Grimaldi who pointed out two different ways to spell this deceptively simple-sounding word - "whoa" and "whoah" - and wanted to which was preferable.
Seeing those two spellings side by side had us double-guessing our own spelling of "whoa." It was hard to remember which, if either, we actually use.
"Whoa" showed up in the 15th century in English and appears to have been a variant of "ho." It was used as a command for horses and other draft animals, to get them to stop. By the 19th century, it had become a way to get people's attention or to express surprise or interest, sometimes even alarm.
The standardized spelling in the U.S., as provided by both the Associated Press and Merriam Webster, is "whoa," so that's what we've been using in this article. Some dictionaries list variants including "woah," "whoah," "whoo," whoh," and "whoe."
On the A Way With Words podcast, co-hosts Martha Barnette and Grant Barrett note that that the reason we have so many variants could be the fact that "whoa" is largely an oral interjection. We're only now starting to see it get written down more because it shows up in social media and on the internet.
