yeet
Language: English
Part of speech: verb
Pronunciation: ipa: /jiːt/
rhymes: -iːt
Forms: form: yeets
form: yeeting
form: yeeted
form: yeeted
form: yote
form: yote
Etymology: Popularized in March 2014 by the "yeet" dance which went viral on the now-defunct video sharing site Vine. The earliest known yeet dance is recorded in a YouTube video uploaded on February 3, 2014. However, examples of the interjection can be found much earlier, including a 1998 use by British presenter Jeremy Clarkson as well as a 2008 definition of "yeet yeet" on Urban Dictionary.
As an expression used when throwing something, apparently coined by Vine user David Banna in a Vine uploaded on or before March 28, 2014 in which he throws a CD and yells out "YEET!", as well as a Vine uploaded April 4, 2014 of a high school student hurling an empty soda can and shouting "This bitch empty! YEET!"
After the 2014 trend, the term faded into relative obscurity before resurging in 2018.
Senses: examples: text: yeet the baby
text: Towards the end of the fire, Kelling overheard the student talking to his friends about "yeeting" his "Speak Freely" into the fire...[He] ran up to the fence and threw his book toward the fire, yelling out "yeet" while he threw it.
ref: 2018 November 19, Zachary Shevin, “U. community gathers, chants, 'yeets' during first bonfire since 2013”, in The Daily Princetonian:
text: It's the moment the troll lifts up a lump of turf and yeets it at a hero on a horse
ref: 2018 December 20, Petrana Radulovic, “Hytale is a Minecraft follow-up that remembers the minigames”, in Rock Paper Shotgun:
text: [A] “Yeeting Zone” is going to be established to solve the problem of dangerous VK bottle yeeting. This comes after unsuspecting Notts students have fallen victim to having bottles thrown in their face...He hopes that this new arrangement will allow clubbers to yeet their VKs, whilst ensuring that other clubbers stay safe.
ref: 2019 April 1, Joshua Gottlieb, “Andy Hoe to create 'Yeeting Zone' in Ocean for safe VK yeeting”, in The Tab:
text: Brady gladly participated and yeeted (maybe the past tense of yeet, meaning to throw, is "yote"?) a football through Damon's window.
ref: 2019 May 3, David Mello, “Tom Brady Appears on Jimmy Kimmel Live! and Yeets a Football Through Matt Damon's Window”, in Up To Boston, archived from the original on 13 May 2019:
glosses: To throw (something) with great force; to hurl.
examples: text: All of a sudden he yeeted out of here [on] a dodo.
ref: 2018, Loe Swonny, Flyff Apleman, The Minecraft Toilet, page 14:
text: [Y]our main character can yeet his way around town instead of walking...When you’re not yeeting around town at 100km/ph^([sic]), you’ll be traversing Jail Island, beating down baddies and ploughing through the main quest line.
ref: 2019 March 19, Leah Williams, “The best part about One Piece: World Series is all the yeeting”, in The AU Review:
text: There is also the possibility that [a series featuring Loki] takes place in the version of 2012 where Loki stole the Tesseract and yeeted off to who knows where.
ref: 2019 April 27, Petrana Radulovic, “What Phase 4 looks like after Avengers: Endgame”, in Polygon:
glosses: To move quickly; to dash, zoom.
examples: text: [Image:] The irrational urge to relive my glory days of yeeting
ref: 2021 December 19, Sarah McManus, anonymous quotee, “Self-Harm Memes: Healthy or Harmful?”, in The Blade and Beyond, archived from the original on 29 Jul 2024:
text: One Tumblelogger complained that the new vocabulary sounded embarrassing; other Tumbleloggers embraced this language, talking about doing "styros" or announcing their plans to "yeet" later.
ref: 2022 January 29, Federica Guccini, Gerald McKinley, “"How deep do I have to cut?": Non-suicidal self-injury and imagined communities of practice on Tumblr”, in Social Science & Medicine, volume 296, Elsevier, →DOI, →ISSN, page 6:
text: Many of these Reddit pages use a series of euphemisms that dehumanize the body. Lacerations are "yeeting," the white flesh just beneath the skin is "styrofoam," and "beans" are the bubbles of fat deeper underneath the skin.
ref: 2022 April 24, Brad Jones, “Mom Blames LGBT Club for Teen's Suicide”, in Insight, volume 2, number 14, The Epoch Times, page 41:
text: Having extreme urges, I need to YEET please help me, I don’t know what to do
ref: 2023, Vinay Jagdish Sukhija, anonymous quotee, “Slang and Self-Harm: A Qualitative Exploration of the Usage of Slang on Reddit Self-Harm Communities”, in thesis.unipd.it, University of Padua, archived from the original on 29 Jul 2024, page 31:
text: Too many adds^([sic]) per test. There were 4 in my test 1 banner ad. And 3 that took me out of the test. I may use again but over time this would cause me to yeet
ref: 2023 August 15, Erin Lucy Funnell, Benedetta Spadaro, Nayra Martin-Key, Tim Metcalfe, Sabine Bahn, anonymous quotee, “mHealth Solutions for Mental Health Screening and Diagnosis: A Review of App User Perspectives Using Sentiment and Thematic Analysis”, in Abhishek Pratap, Patricia A. Arean, Benjamin Nelson, Brenna Renn, Abigail Ortiz, editors, Digital Mental Health Research: Understanding Participant Engagement and Need for User-centered Assessment and Interventional Digital Tools, →DOI, →ISBN, →ISSN, page 44:
glosses: To self-harm.