Hip, Hip, Hurrah! Artist’s Party, Skagen, oil on canvas painting by Peder Severin Krøyer, 1888.
10 July 2023
The cheer, also commonly hip hip hurray/hurrah, as we know it today, dates to the early nineteenth century, but its components go back further. The cheer is often delivered with the hips as a call and hooray or hurrah as a response.
The Oxford English Dictionary has a citation from the London and Provincial Sunday Gazette of 6 June 1819 that reads:
Down with Popery—Pitt for ever—his Majesty’s Ministers—Hip! Hip! Hip! Hurrah!
But the use of the standalone hip as a cry to attract attention is recorded by 1735 and as a cheer by 1811. The hip is probably just an echoic term, a sharp sound to attract attention with no other underlying meaning.
The hurrah portion is even older, recorded as early as 1686. Even earlier is the cry of huzza, which is recorded by 1573. The shift from the / z / to the / ɹ / sound may simply be random variation, or it could reflect the influence of other languages. Various other Germanic languages as well as Russian have cries similar to hurrah. Again, this cry has no specific meaning, it’s just a combination of sounds that are easy to yell.
There is a persistent myth that the cry hip hip hooray has an antisemitic origin. Like most myths, there is a grain of truth at its core, but that truth is distorted beyond all recognition. There were a series of antisemitic riots and pogroms in Germany in 1819, in which the protesters took up the rallying cry of hep hep. The riots subsequently became known as the Hep Hep Riots. But the German cry is unrelated to the English language cheer, which as we have seen predates the German riots. Another part of the myth is that hep is a Latin acronym for Hierosolyma est perdita (Jerusalem is lost), allegedly a crusader’s cry. This is certainly not true as acronymic word origins were almost nonexistent prior to the twentieth century and there is no evidence that the Latin phrase goes back to the Crusades. Like the English hip, this antisemitic cry is simply a sound that is easy to yell.
Sources:
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2018, s.v. hip hip hooray, int. and n., hip hip hooray, v., hip, int. and n.3; second edition, 1989, hurrah | hurray, int. and n., huzza, int. and n.
Image credit: Gothenburg Museum of Art, Sweden (F 62). Wikimedia Commons. Public domain work as a mechanical reproduction of a public domain work.