Other forms: whooping, whoops, whooped
To whoop is to shout out loudly in excitement. Whoop with delight, whooping and cheering, a whoop went up.
It is a sound of celebration rather than of anger. As a noun, a whoop is one such cry. Whooping cough is the childhood illness named for the long noise made when drawing breath after coughing, and it is pronounced HOOP-ing there while the ordinary verb is WOOP. Note whoop it up, meaning to celebrate loudly; and that whoops with an s is an exclamation of mild error and unrelated.
1verbwhoopTo shout out loudly in excitement.
“The whole room whooped when the score came through.”
2nouncryA loud cry of excitement.
“There was a whoop from somewhere at the back.”
whoop is a loud cry.
Old French houper meant to call out, and the word is essentially imitative. Whooping cough was named in the eighteenth century for the sound rather than the cough, which is why the illness has such a cheerful name.
Proto-Germanic
*hwōpaną — to boast, threaten
Proto-West Germanic
*hwōpan
Old French
houper
Middle English
whopen
English, today
whoop
Built from
From Middle English whopen, whowpen, howpen, houpen (“to whoop, cry out”), partially from Old French houper, hopper, houpper (“to shout”), from Proto-West Germanic hwōpan, from Proto-Germanic hwōpaną (“to boast, threaten”) (compare Gothic 𐍈𐍉𐍀𐌰𐌽 (“to boast”), Old English hwōpan (“to threaten”)); and partially from Middle English wop (“weeping, lamentation”), from Old English wōp (“cry, outcry, shrieking, weeping, lamentation”), from Proto-West Germanic wōp, from Proto-Germanic wōpaz (“shout, cry, wail”) (compare Old Norse ópa (“to cry, scream, shout”), Gothic 𐍅𐍉𐍀𐌾𐌰𐌽 (“to cry out”)).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in A Song of Ice and Fire