antedating of "yow"

Mon Apr 23 19:46:13 UTC 2007

The latest OED online offers  "Yow," interj., "2c. An exclamation of pain, fear, or dismay" from 1941. This is earlier:

  1925 in John Dos Passos _The Fourteenth Chronicle_ (Boston: Gambit, 1973) 352: "Yow!--all of which means that I'm smoothing out my passport and piling up my pennies for a couple of months galivant.

  JL

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