wow (interj.)

Wow can sound very modern. The Dictionaries of the Scots Language records it in Peblis to the Play, with the example dated before 1500, and in Gavin Douglas’s writing of 1513. People were putting this familiar reaction into words more than five centuries ago.¹

Those early examples carry a range of feelings. The dictionary identifies astonishment and fear as well as admiration. In one example from 1540, someone cries out at what they see. In another, a frightened speaker asks for room to get away. The sound could accompany an alarming sight as readily as an impressive one.¹

The word had renewed popularity in the early twentieth century and again during the 1960s. It also became a verb. By 1924, American slang used wow for overwhelming someone with delight or amazement, the sense we use when a performer wows an audience.²

In 1977, the exclamation acquired a place in astronomy. On August 15, Ohio State University’s Big Ear radio telescope detected an unusually strong radio signal during a search for extraterrestrial intelligence. A few days later, the volunteer astronomer Jerry Ehman was reviewing the computer printout when he noticed the sequence 6EQUJ5. He marked the characters in red and wrote “Wow!” in the margin. His colleague John Kraus began calling it the Wow! signal.³

The six characters recorded changes in the signal’s strength. They showed it growing stronger and then fading as the Earth’s rotation carried the telescope’s view past that part of the sky. The pattern caught Ehman’s attention because it matched what he would expect from a compact radio source in the sky.³⁴

Follow-up observations have not detected the same signal again, and its origin remains unresolved. The name came from Ehman’s handwritten reaction as he examined the data.³⁴

Wow, I hadn’t realized how high we had climbed.