Meh
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The OED dates meh as an interjection back to 1992, in an internet newsgroup, and as an adjective back to 2007 in The Guardian:
The man could scarcely walk. Two hours later he was cheerfully high-kicking a suicide bomber out the back of a train. Nuts. But somehow it all seemed, to use a bit of internet parlance, a bit ‘meh’.
But this bit of "internet parlance" has started showing up in news headlines, without excuses or scare quotes, and not just in places like college papers.
[Update– For more on the origins and progress of meh, see "Meh-ness to society" (Ben Zimmer, 6/98/2006), "Awwa, meh, feh, heh" (Ben Zimmer, 2/16/2007), "The 'meh' wars" (Ben Zimmer, 11/21/2008), "The 'meh' wars, part 2" (11/24/2008), "Meh again" (Arnold Zwicky, 12/1/2011), "Words for 'meh'" (Mark Liberman, 12/22/2011), "Three scenes in the life of 'meh'" (Ben Zimmer, 2/26/2012).]
Some examples:
"The Meh Tax Bill That Has to Pass", WSJ 7/1/2025
"I Tried This $40 Smartwatch: It Was Meh, but Not a Complete Waste of Time", CNET 7/202025
"‘Not dire, not amazing, more meh’: Job market cools as quits plummet in stagnant labor picture", Fortune 7/29/2025
"Gerrymandering? Meh", National Review 8/6/2025
"2025 Minnesota State Fair's new food items ranked, from best to … meh", CBS News 8/29/2025
"If American films are meh…are China’s better?", NPR 10/6/2025
"Gemini’s IPO Was Meh. But Wall Street Still Likes the Crypto Firm.", Barron's 10/7/2025.
Some outlets are still using scare quotes, though we can expect that to end before long:
"AI gets more 'meh' as you get to know it better, researchers discover", The Register 10/8/2025
"How ‘Meh’ AI Could Cost Companies More Than It Saves", Bloomberg 10/11/225
"The Real AI Risk is ‘Meh’ Technology That Takes Jobs and Annoys Us All", Bloomberg 10/12/2025
There are even headlines with clever meh-based wordplay (though the TVWoP example "meh-ness to society" goes back to 2006, as documented in Ben Zimmer's post):
"‘F1: THE MOVIE’ Review: Brad Pitt’s ‘TOP GUN: Meh-VERICK’", Fresh Fiction 6/17/2025
"On nostalgia: No country for old meh!" Shots Magazine 9/29/2025
"Fears for depressed turnout in the 2025 Calgary meh-lection", CBC 10/12/2025
So meh joins a list of words that start out as conventional (though variable) spellings of (what some linguists call) "non-speech vocalizations". First used in text as interjections, they then evolve into nouns and adjectives, sometimes with various morphological extensions. Here are few examples, some of which go back to Old English and beyond:
ick, icky, …
ew
ugh
yuck, yucks
wow, wowee, wowsers, ..
whew
whoa
ha, haha, hoho, …
uh, um, eh, er, …
foo, phooey, pfui, …
mm-hmm, uh-uh, …
There are some corners of this space that have their own set of morpho-semantic patterns, as discussed in "mmhmm etc." 8/18/2018, and "Hummed 'I don't know'", 8/29/2021.
There are also some interesting syntactic details. For example, there's been wide adoption of "(get) the ick" (e.g. here and here) — but I've never seen similar uses of "the meh", and I'm not expecting to.
Coby said,
October 13, 2025 @ 8:32 am
What I found striking about 'meh' is that it is, as far as I know, the only English word ending in /ɛ/.
Mark Liberman said,
October 13, 2025 @ 8:42 am
@Coby:
There's also "heh" and "eh"?
And "feh", which is somewhat similar in meaning to "meh", though more negative, and not yet commonly transitioned to modifier status. Here's a quote from the Chicago Tribune in 2019:
You've also noticed the multitudes of hyperbolic scriveners promising breathlessly "the best" recipe, "the best" restaurant, "the best" whatever. Feh. I hate to break it to you, kids, but there is no best. Ever.
Robert Coren said,
October 13, 2025 @ 9:04 am
I pronounce "eh" more like /ɛɪ/ than /ɛ/, and that's how I'm used to hearing it, from both Canadians and non-Canadians.
Interesting thing about "ugh", which originally was an orthographic representation of the kind of involuntary noise that might accompany a shudder, with the "gh" indicating something somewhere between /x/ and the voiced version thereof (for which I can't remember the correct IPA), but these days people tend to read it as /ʊɡ/, rhyming with "bug".
Mark Liberman said,
October 13, 2025 @ 10:26 am
@Robert Coren: "I pronounce "eh" more like /ɛɪ/ than /ɛ/, and that's how I'm used to hearing it, from both Canadians and non-Canadians."
I agree, for the stereotypically Canadian "eh". But there's another one I sometimes hear, and maybe sometimes say, that's roughly equivalent to "huh?", and is used to mean something like "what was that again?"
Gregory Kusnick said,
October 13, 2025 @ 11:13 am
Years ago I read a review in the Seattle Times of a Brazilian restaurant called Ipanema. The critic gave it a mediocre rating, ending with the line "And when I pass it, each time I pass, I'll say 'Eh'."
Jerry Packard said,
October 13, 2025 @ 1:43 pm
…and "feh", which is somewhat similar in meaning to "meh"…”
… not to be confused with phở US: /fʌ/ Canada: /fɔː/ Vietnamese: [fəː˧˩˧]
Philip Taylor said,
October 13, 2025 @ 1:52 pm
which is a not-infrequent source of confusion when one of our waitresses cannot be sure whether a customer is asking for faux beef or beef phở …
Mark Liberman said,
October 13, 2025 @ 3:59 pm
The pronunciation that I learned for phở (from Vietnamese friends in Vietnam and in the U.S.) is /fʊ/, vowel more or less as in English "foot". I was told that the word is a borrowing from (the last syllable of) French "pot au feu", though Wiktionary says that's a folk etymology, and provides this audio for the Hanoi version /fəː/. There's an excellent Wikipedia article that's more even-handed about French vs. Cantonese origins.
J.W. Brewer said,
October 13, 2025 @ 4:27 pm
As of 15 or so years ago there was a Vietnamese restaurant in New Haven named Pot Au Pho that my now-wife used to eat at from time to time. The internet alas indicates that it has more recently undergone a change of management and a change of name (to the blander "Pho Haven"), and also lost its liquor license although feel free to BYOB. I imagine there must be other pho-selling establishments in the U.S. with names involving similar wordplay.
Ambarish Sridharanarayanan said,
October 13, 2025 @ 6:07 pm
Clearly the most famous example of an English word that rhymes with meh is not eh or feh but kitteh?
JPL said,
October 13, 2025 @ 6:27 pm
@Coby:
Where does the initial "m' come from? (Why does it have one, since that seems to be the 1992 innovation?) BTW, it seems to have gone from an expression of emotional underwhelm in reaction to an object or event presented as significant, to a description of a property of the object or event that evoked it. (The process of lexicalization.) But if pressed to use a historical English lexeme instead of the "meh" to describe the object or event, I would imagine that there would be a variety for the examples given.
SlideSF said,
October 13, 2025 @ 6:59 pm
I slways took "feh" as a reaction to something that smells bad or is otherwise mildly disgusting. "Meh", on the other hand, indicates mediocrity or underwhelmingness.
Chris Button said,
October 13, 2025 @ 7:02 pm
@Jerry Packard
It looks like the Canada and the US might be approximating a northern vs southern Vietnamese distinction there!
Michael Watts said,
October 13, 2025 @ 7:19 pm
Well, it has one because the 'm' is part of the word.
As wiktionary accurately notes, this word is widely known because of its use on The Simpsons, and therefore its features are defined by that use, the same way your pronunciation of any word you didn't just coin is defined by the way you've heard other people produce it.
The first use on The Simpsons dates to 1994, but "Meh" appears in that form in the script, suggesting that the word was already conventionalized at that time. There's an article on Slate in which the author tracks down a comedy writer for The Simpsons who reports that he knew someone who advocated for "meh" as an inherently funny word in the 1970s. The article also notes that me appears as an interjection with the same meaning as the English interjection in a Yiddish dictionary of 1928.
So it's not really clear that any innovation of any kind occurred in 1992.
It's by a guy named Ben Zimmer, and there's a footnote at the bottom remarking that the piece previously appeared on Language Log.
Michael Watts said,
October 13, 2025 @ 7:34 pm
One-offs where some linguistic phenomenon only appears in some given language in one unique case appear to be more common than I might have expected.
Other examples in English:
Phonemic glottal stop: uh-uh, uh-oh (technically, this is two times, but still)
Lexical tone: I don't know
Jonathan Smith said,
October 13, 2025 @ 10:35 pm
Tracking down a couple of the Wikipedia phở citations just because —
Du Village à la Cité: Moeurs Annamites (Jean Marquet, 1920?):
At least in the edition on Hathitext, this text has not feu but pheu, viz.
"Yoc Pheu!" Voilà le marchand de soupe. Achetez au frère cuisinier un bol du soupe du bœuf.
"Mieng ga, mieng vit." C'est la concurrence du chionois, marchand de brouet de canard et de poulet.
[Dubious ChatGPT English: "Yoc Pheu!" There’s the soup vendor. Buy from the cook brother a bowl of beef soup. "Mieng ga, mieng vit." That’s the Chinese competitor, seller of duck and chicken broth.]
where yoc would seem to be some Yue e.g. Cantonese word 'meat', mieng would seem to be some Sinitic word 'noodles' (more precision possible if -ng taken at face value), and gà = V. 'chicken', vịt = V. 'duck'. The hybrid noodle-dish names use V. head-modifier order, whereas syntax of yoc pheu depends on one's understanding of pheu I guess…
Here pheu is not noodles or some such per se, as the Chinese etymologies have it (e.g. as from Cant. [mai5]fan2 [米]粉 '[rice] vermicelli [noodles]'), but [beef] soup/broth.
"Đánh bạc" (Tản Đà, 1915?):
"…mà chỉ thức đêm ăn nhục phở"
'just staying up all night eating nhục phở… perhaps same dish as above as Wiki suggests
Nhật Dụng Thường Đàm 日用常談 (Phạm Đình Hổ, 1827):
This text has a (let's call it) Sino-Vietnamese entry "玉酥餅" glossed in Nôm as "羅普" which Nomfoundation.org "transcribes" bánh phổ bò and defines as 'a type of sponge cake having many holes like a cow’s lung' i.e. parsing [bánh] phổ bò '[cow lung] cake' with "普" read as phổi 'lung' (or maybe there's a typo or I am missing sth.) But Wiki and many others suggest rather the reading [bánh phở] bò i.e. 'beef [noodle pho]' with "普" read as phở.
IDK, this seems possible but this is a century earlier than the above refs… at a glance I don't see "普" used elsewhere in this text in a similar way. At any rate, again the "noodle" word per se is not phở; here it is bánh 'noodle [sheet], cake, etc.' (also sometimes claimed to have Chinese relatives; cf. esp. Hakka pán). This seems to square with modern usage e.g. bánh phở…
Conclusion: looks like phở meant (means?) beef+broth, not noodles. French etymology at least makes sense. Chinese ideas not so much.
Jonathan Smith said,
October 13, 2025 @ 10:41 pm
^ two Nôm characters lost… the four-character gloss is "羅 [食+丙] 普 [牛+甫]" where first one is just formulaic 'is'…
Philip Taylor said,
October 14, 2025 @ 3:11 am
"your pronunciation of any word you didn't just coin is defined by the way you've heard other people produce it" — I would respectfully disagree. My pronunciation of "England" and "English" is based solely in reading the words before I heard others pronounce them (thus /ˈeŋ ɡlənd/ and /ˈeŋ ɡlɪʃ/, not /ˈɪŋ ɡlənd/ and /ˈɪŋ ɡlɪʃ/). I almost certainly learned how to pronounce (you might legitimately argue "mis-pronounce") others words in the same way.
Michael Watts said,
October 14, 2025 @ 5:33 am
Well, it's true that you can encounter words in writing before hearing them pronounced.
"English" seems like an implausible word for that to happen with.
David Marjanović said,
October 14, 2025 @ 5:35 am
Instead, I've seen a graphic pun a few times: the ở rendered as a teacup-shaped bowl with steam rising from it.
Roscoe said,
October 14, 2025 @ 7:23 am
@Robert Coren: Cf. “tsk, tsk,” which began life as a rough transcription of a tongue-clicking sound before people started pronouncing it “tisk tisk.”
Robert Coren said,
October 14, 2025 @ 8:47 am
@Roscoe: Yup. I think there are other examples like this, but none are occurring to me at the moment.
While I'm here, I'd like to apologize for messing up the IPA in my earlier post, where I used "/ʊɡ/" to indicate the sound rhyming with "bug"; of course it should have been "/ʌg/".
Philip Taylor said,
October 14, 2025 @ 12:20 pm
Robert, Roscoe (in re "tsk task"). Which we Britons render as "tut tut", which to my ear is a lot closer to "a tongue clicking sound" than "tsk tsk" could ever be. (And I typed "tsk" as "task" four (no, five, including the occurrence in this parenthesis) times, having to manually correct each retrospectively – my muscle memory flatly refused to accept that "tsk" (now six times) was a valid production).
Jonathan Smith said,
October 14, 2025 @ 2:40 pm
The favored pho pun in these parts is "pho-king good." Which at least does the vowel right (for me) as to my ear the Vietnamese word always has pretty much [ə] and certainly not [ʊ]…
Chester Draws said,
October 14, 2025 @ 4:18 pm
Many of these "unique" occurrences assume standard English.
Some traditional varieties are quite different. There are versions of English where "bottle" has a glottal stop, for example, rather than a /t/.
My particular brand of English (broad white New Zealand) manages to diphthong single vowel sounds (e.g. lake), while at the same time making every short vowel more or less a schwa.
The /ɛ/ ending would seem to be related to disgust in some way. My wife is quite capable of saying "sticky" correctly , but will say "stickeh" when she feels over sweaty.
Michael Watts said,
October 14, 2025 @ 9:01 pm
The scolding click is /k|/. It doesn't sound like "tsk" to me, and I wouldn't have been able to spontaneously guess that that was what "tsk" was supposed to mean. (I was taught, though.)
However, the spelling is spookily accurate as to some fundamentals. The tongue position is about right for /ts/, and the "k" presumably comes from the velar closure required by clicks.
"Tut" doesn't have those advantages. If it were a click, it seems like it would have to represent /k!/, which at least American speakers find nearly impossible to pronounce. (There is a click that American speakers can make with the same tongue position, but a lateral airflow giving a heavy "L" sound to the click. I spontaneously invented that click when I was small, mentally modeling it as a "kla" sound, and my sister invented the same thing when trying to imitate an example /k!/. I'd love to know more about why this sound is more natural to AmE speakers than /k!/ is. Despite having an apparently good fit with the phonology of the language, it has no linguistic use, unlike /k|/.)
Michael Watts said,
October 14, 2025 @ 9:04 pm
I may have messed up my clicks. "Tut tut" seems like it would have to be an alveolar click, the popping sound, to me. I transcribed this as /k!/, but maybe it should be /kǂ/.
Philip Taylor said,
October 15, 2025 @ 4:39 am
I'm not a phonetician, so leave terms such as "alveolar" to those who are. All I can say is that when I make the sound which I would write as "tut tut", my tongue tip curls downwards but the peak of the tongue's arch is in contact with the frontmost part of my hard palate, and the downward (frontmost) part of my tongue presses again the inside of my upper teeth. I then endeavour to draw in air and quickly move my tongue downwards and backwards to allow air to enter. I would have no idea how to represent this sound using the IPA.
Michael Watts said,
October 15, 2025 @ 4:55 am
Zulu click sounds (youtube)
At around 0:12, the presenter pronounces a dental click in front of a series of five vowels, |a |e |i |o |u, and follows that up by pronouncing another click in front of the same five vowels, !a !e !e !o !u. This wraps up around 0:18.
Technically you're supposed to write g! for a click with voicing and k! for one with no voicing. I haven't done that here because I have no idea how to tell the difference.
From your description, it does sound like "tut tut" means the same click to you that "tsk tsk" does to us. (The first kind of click presented, not the second kind.) But you can confirm that against the video if you're so minded.
Roscoe said,
October 15, 2025 @ 6:26 am
Like many other Americans, I grew up thinking “tut tut” was pronounced “tut tut” because that’s how Christopher Robin said it in Disney’s “Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree.”
Philip Taylor said,
October 15, 2025 @ 6:59 am
One should be careful when learning how to pronounce something on the basis of a film — the film Watership Down would lead one to believe that "Hru-du-du" was pronounce /hruː duː duː/, not /hrʌ dʌ dʌ/ (the sound of a low-revving diesel engine in a tractor) as Richard Adams clearly intended !
Robert Coren said,
October 15, 2025 @ 9:02 am
Another variant of the scolding "click" is "tch, tch", although i don't think I've seen it recently.
Jim said,
October 15, 2025 @ 2:44 pm
I always understood "feh" to be Yiddish — although I don't know where I got that understanding from, so maybe I just assumed it — and if pressed, I would have guessed "meh" had a similar origin, or at least generated as a more (well) meh form of "feh".