Month: February 2025

Q: The act of clinking glasses and saying “cheers” is becoming known as “cheersing.” Well, there wasn’t already a word for this, so I guess we needed one. What do you think of this neo-verb?

A: The use of “cheers” as a verb meaning to say “cheers” in a toast, often while clinking glasses, has been around for at least two decades. Standard dictionaries haven’t recognized it yet, but two collaborative online dictionaries have entries:

Wiktionary defines it as “to say ‘cheers’ as a toast (to someone)” and has this example: “We cheersed and started drinking” (from Unheard Love: Experience the Illusion of Love, 2018, a novel by Kavya Mahadik).

Urban Dictionary (in a 2011 entry) says it’s a “clickety clank clack of glasses in union, most commonly to refer to beer mugs raised in celebration.” Example: “He spilt nearly half of his Budweiser when he cheersed his glass with Pat’s.”

The earliest example we’ve found is from Mosh Pit (2004), by the Canadian novelist Kristyn Dunnion: “Choosy Soozy was drinking shots at the bar with her friends. I cheersed her with my fist because I didn’t have a beer yet, and she yelled, ‘Hey, thanks for coming to the show!’ ”

Interestingly, saying “cheers” as “a toast or salutation before drinking” is relatively recent, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. The interjection first appeared in the early 20th century.

The OED’s earliest citation is from a newspaper in Perth, Australia: “The brief toast of ‘Cheers, dears!’ ” (Sunday Times, Sept. 14, 1930). However, the dictionary cautions that “the earliest use so far traced comes from Australia but it is uncertain whether it originated there.”

As for the etymology, the OED says the interjection apparently originated as the plural of the noun “cheer,” which meant one’s countenance, face, or emotional state when it appeared in the late 12th or early 13th centuries.

The first two senses are now obsolete, but the third—the emotional state—is still seen in the somewhat musty expression “be of good cheer,” which Oxford dates back to Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (circa 1385):

“Loue hath beset þe wel be of good chere” (“Love hath beset thee well, be of good cheer”).

In the 15th century, the noun “cheer” took on the sense of “food and drink provided for a guest or (now chiefly) enjoyed on a festive occasion,” the OED says.

The dictionary’s first example is from Le Morte Darthur (circa 1470), Sir Thomas Malory’s Middle English prose version of the Anglo-Norman Arthurian tales. In this passage, the desolate Palamedes, who’s hopelessly in love with Isolde, doesn’t feel up to dinner:

“So they wente vnto mete, but sir Palomydes myght nat ete, and there was alle the chire that myght be had” (“So they went to dinner, but Sir Palamedes could not eat, despite all the cheer [food and drink] that might be had”).

In the early 18th century, the OED says, the noun “cheer” came to mean “a shout of acclamation, encouragement, or jubilation; esp. (in singular and plural) the loud, collective shouts and other expressions of acclamation of a company or crowd.”

The first Oxford citation is from The Barbacue Feast: or, the Three Pigs of Peckham, Broil’d Under an Apple-Tree (1707), by the British satirist Edward Ward: “A huge Whistle-booby Boatswain … commanded three Chears from the Company.”

The dictionary notes that the term could refer at this time to specific shouts of “hear hear,” “hurrah,” “huzza,” and so on. However, none of the examples cited include shouts of “cheer” or “cheers.”

In the early 20th century, the interjection “cheers” began being “used as an expression of encouragement, approval, or enthusiasm,” Oxford says. The first citation, which we’ve expanded, is from a letter written on May 30, 1915, by W. Robert Foran, a British Army officer, big game hunter, and writer:

“We go out in a couple of weeks to the front. Cheers! Love to all my old friends in the Club. Send me THE SCOOP. Best wishes from Вob” (from the June 19, 1915, issue of The Scoop, a daily published by the Press Club of Chicago from 1911-17).

And as we mentioned above, the earliest OED citation for the use of the interjection “cheers” as a toast or salutation before drinking appeared in Australia in 1930.

In the dictionary’s next example for this sense of the word, two old friends exchange drinking salutations:

“ ‘Cheers!’ said the one, and ‘Here’s mud in your eye!’ the other” (from The Clock Ticks On, a 1933 mystery by the British author and journalist Valentine Williams).

In the late 20th century, the interjection “cheers” took on the sense of “thanks” in British English. The first OED example is from the British journalist Phillip Howard in The Times, London, Aug. 4, 1976:

“By a remarkable transition from the pub to the sober world at large outside cheers has become the colloquial synonym in British English for ‘thanks.’ ”

Finally, here’s an example from Kingsley Amis’s novel Jake’s Thing (1978). In this passage, Jake is relieved that a news agent doesn’t smirk when he sees a racy magazine among those Jake has selected:

“As it turned out he had been hard on this man, who politely didn’t smile or leer when he saw Jake’s selection, named a cash sum once and said Cheers five times, the first time when he noticed the approach of his customer, again when he handed the magazines, again when he took money, again when he gave change and the last time when bidden good-bye.”

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Q: I find the singular “dynamic” is increasingly being used as a noun. For example, “the meeting had a strange dynamic.” I’m OK with “dynamics” as a noun, but how did “dynamic” get that status?

A: The use of the singular noun “dynamic” for something that influences growth, change, progress, and so on has been around since the late 19th century and is standard English.

We find the usage a bit jargony, but it’s recognized by all the standard dictionaries we regularly consult. Merriam-Webster, for example, defines it as “a force or factor that controls or influences a process of growth, change, interaction, or activity.”

M-W cites a review by the pediatrician and microbiologist June E. Osborn in The New York Times Book Review, April 7, 1996: “Denial has always been the most devastating social and political dynamic of the AIDS epidemic.”

An earlier sense of “dynamic” came into English in the late 18th century, borrowed from the French adjective dynamique (dynamic). The French term comes from the Greek adjective δυναμικός (dunamikos, powerful) and noun δύναμις (dunamis, power or strength), according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

When the word first appeared in English, the OED says, it was a plural noun for “the branch of Physics which treats of the action of Force: in earlier use restricted to the action of force in producing or varying motion.”

The dictionary’s earliest citation is from The New Royal Encyclopaedia Londinensis; or, Complete, Modern and Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences (1788), by George Selby Howard:

“Dynamics is the science of moving powers; more particularly of the motion of bodies that mutually act on one another.”

In the early 19th century, the OED says, the plural noun took on the sense of “the moving physical or moral forces in any sphere, or the laws by which they act.”

The first OED citation is from On the Power Wisdom and Goodness of God (1833), a treatise by the Church of Scotland minister and social reformer Thomas Chambers: “To unsettle the moral dynamics which nature hath established there.”

The singular noun “dynamic” appeared in the late 19th century in the same sense as “dynamics” where the plural term means a branch of physics. The first OED citation is from an 1873 paper on mathematics:

“The science which teaches under what circumstances particular motions take place … is called Dynamic … It is divided into two parts, Static … and Kinetic” (Mathematical Papers, 1882, by William Kingdon Clifford).

The singular noun soon took on the sense of an “energizing or motive force”—the meaning you’re noticing. The OED’s earliest citation is from a book that examines Darwinism in a Christian context:

“The Struggle for Life, as life’s dynamic, can never wholly cease.” From The Ascent of Man, 1894, by Henry Drummond, a Scottish evangelist, biologist, and writer. (The book was based on Drummond’s 1893 lectures at the Lowell Institute in Boston.)

As for the adjective “dynamic,” the dictionary says it first appeared in the early 19th century, when it meant “of or pertaining to force producing motion: often opposed to static.”

The first OED citation is from an 1827 paper in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, the national academy of science in the United Kingdom.

In the paper, Davies Gilbert, the society’s president, notes that the Scottish engineer James Watt introduced the term “duty” (the useful effect of an engine in work performed) “for what has been called in other countries the dynamic unit.”

In the mid-19th century, Oxford says, the adjective took on the figurative sense of “active, potent, energetic, effective, forceful.” The first citation is from English Traits (1856), Ralph Waldo Emerson’s portrait of the English people.

In commenting on their wills, letters, public documents, proverbs, and speech, Emerson writes, “Their dynamic brains hurled off their words, as the revolving stone hurls off scraps of grit.”

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