boah

What it means

1. 1.

   The German all-purpose exclamation: awe, exasperation, disgust, disbelief. Length and pitch do all the semantic work — a short flat boah is annoyance, a long rising one is amazement.

2. 2.

   'Boah ey' is the classic 1980s–90s Ruhr-flavoured version. It still gets said constantly, but it now carries a faint retro colouring, a bit like English 'no way' does.

Examples with translations

• Boah, ist das heiß hier.

  God, it's hot in here.

• Boah ey, jetzt reicht's.

  Oh for crying out loud, that's enough.

Where it comes from

A natural expressive sound rather than a word with an etymology, standardised in spelling by comics and by the Ruhr-comedy boom of the 1980s. Its spread nationally is usually credited to television — Ruhr dialect was heavily represented in West German comedy of that decade.

Other forms

Spellings and variants:

boa, boah ey, boar