Slang dictionary
yeet
or ya yeet [ yeet ] or [ yah yeet ]
What does yeet mean?
Yeet is an exclamation of excitement, approval, surprise, or all-around energy, often as issued when doing a dance move or throwing something.
Where does yeet come from?
An Urban Dictionary entry from 2008 defined yeet as an excited exclamation, particularly in sports and sexual contexts. Another defined yeet yeet as an expression of approval, à la That’s what I’m talking about it! Yeet Yeet!
Yeet, then, appears to be an organic interjection. It doesn’t sound too dissimilar, after all, from exclamations like Yes! or Aight!
The term spreads as a dance in black social media culture in February 2014. Several people are credited for the dance, including YouTuber Milik Fullilove, who calls out Yeet! as he does his moves with personal flourishes.
More YouTube yeet demonstrations of yeet followed. A hip-hop song by Quill called “YEET” was released, featuring yeet as a general exclamation akin to the earlier, 2008 definitions we saw. Yeet went viral Vine user Jas Nicole posted a video of a young man, called Lil Meatball, doing the dance, noted for a prominent arm chop, in March 2014 over the hip-hop track.
Internet users made remixes of Lil Meatball—and plenty of memes. The memes photoshopped a still of Lil Meatball, arms extended, into various settings, such as playing baseball or drumming.
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Perhaps because people often say yeet while doing the dance, yeet was further popularized as an interjection all its own to show enthusiasm and approval, e.g., Yes, I got an A on that paper. Yeet!
Yeet went viral again in 2016, this time in a video featuring a young woman throwing an empty beverage can into a crowded school hallway while saying Yeet! This video help spread yeet as an exclamation issued when heaving something, often at someone in a playful manner, or when doing something spectacular, as when dunking over someone in basketball.
Young people, apparently, delighted in saying yeet, like one of those things we like to say compulsively over and over again until we wear it out. Gamers took to yeet when making powerful moves. The massively popular, if controversial, YouTuber Logan Paul made a variant, ya yeet, a catchphrase.
Yeet seemed to fade again in popular culture again until March 2018, when users of the subreddit r/dankmemes—dedicated to so-called dank memes, which are deliberately odd and obscure—started posting new yeet memes. They riff on the word yeet in a variety of absurd contexts (perhaps as a commentary on people wearing yeet out), often with images of the face with tears of joy emoji, 😂.
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Yeet, defined as an “indication of surprise or excitement,” was voted the American Dialect Society’s 2018 Slang/Informal Word of the Year.
WATCH: Where Did The Word "Yeet" Come From?
Examples of yeet
Who uses yeet?
Yeet, the dance, can be referred to as the yeet, yeeting, or simply yeet, and is strongly connected to black popular culture. One can dance it to any song or just do it spontaneously.
People have given the exclamatory yeet many definitions and uses, but they mostly hew to senses of a joyous “Hell yes!” that echoes the fun of the dance. This yeet has seen plenty of punning and ironic takes online, including jokes about yote being its past tense.
Yeet 😷 pic.twitter.com/eystwuIGFj
— CalBabe ♔ (@CalebSimms16) July 18, 2018
Other internet users apply yeet to situations where someone is blowing something away, like a wizard with a wand, senses which may call back to yeet‘s use in scoring in sports.
Siegfried: honorably holds his sword showing the source of its power, the True Ether to blow away the mightiest dragons
Sigurd: YEET pic.twitter.com/kJPFkOi5Lt
— Jay @ 3 MONTHS TO INDEX 3 (@anopocrypha) July 17, 2018
Yeet memes, meanwhile, are meant to be intentionally weird and puzzling.
Note
This is not meant to be a formal definition of yeet like most terms we define on Dictionary.com, but is rather an informal word summary that hopefully touches upon the key aspects of the meaning and usage of yeet that will help our users expand their word mastery.