Other forms: shoos, shooed, shooing
Shoo is what you do when you flap your hands at an animal to make it go away. A pigeon on the café table, a cat up on the kitchen counter, a fly circling the fruit bowl.
It is also the word you shout while you do it — 'Shoo! Go on, shoo!' — which is where the verb came from. Shooing is gentle: you wave, you make a noise, you throw nothing. It takes a direction almost every time, so you shoo a dog OFF the sofa, shoo the children OUT into the garden, shoo a wasp AWAY from the jam. You can shoo people, but only in a friendly, half-joking way; shooing your boss out of a meeting would be rude in a way that shooing a duck is not. Watch out for shoo-in, a person certain to win, which is a different creature altogether.
Shoo began as the noise itself. Middle English had scou and schew, a shout meaning roughly 'go away!', and the word for the gesture grew out of the word people were already yelling. Its relatives kept the same job: German scheuchen means to scare something off, and Dutch schuwen means to shun.
Middle English
schew
English, today
shoo
Built from
From Middle English schew, schowe, show, showe, scou (“shoo!”). Compare Middle High German schū, schuo (“shoo!”) (modern German scheu (“shoo!”)), Dutch schuwen (“to shun”), German scheuchen (“to scare, drive away”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA