Last week, we looked into a question about different ways to spell “whoa.” The same listener who asked about “whoa” also asked about the different spellings of “yay.”
Since we couldn’t squeeze everything into one segment, we had to save “yay” for this week.
We kicked things off with a revelation from Professor Anne Curzan regarding how she used to spell “yay” in text messages.
“[I realized that] when I was sending a text to celebrate, when someone sent me some good news or something like that, I would text back ‘Yeah’ with an exclamation mark or two,” Curzan said.
If you got that text from someone, how would you read it? Since “Yeah!” still sounds fairly celebratory, you may not have noticed the error. However, Curzan did eventually realize that “yeah” was not “yay” and changed her spelling.
At this point, many usage guides seem to be in agreement that the celebratory exclamation is spelled “yay.” The spelling “yea” is pronounced the same as “yay” but refers to an affirmative vote, as in “There were 14 yea votes and 20 nays.”
And of course, the spelling Curzan was using, “yeah,” is pronounced differently and is used as a more casual form of “yes.”
Of the three, “yea” is the oldest and goes back to Old English. “Yay” seems to go back to at least the beginning of the 20th century, while “yeah” goes back to at least the middle of the 19th century.
For more on these confusing terms, including a joke about double negatives and double positives, listen to the audio above.
