Do the British say "oi"?
Oswaldo Dach
2025-04-19 05:24:23
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In an episode of HBO’s The Newsroom, Emily Mortimer’s character addresses coworkers with a frustrated “oy!” Mortimer does not play a Brooklyn grandmother; “oy” [or “oi“] is a British term roughly similar to American English “hey!” I would assume the show’s American writer, Aaron Sorkin, added the word to give Mortimer’s dialogue a more authentically “British” flair. It’s possible Mortimer’s character might indeed say “oi!” while addressing staff. The word joins a class of terms–including bloke, mate, and bollocks–that make up a writerly box of tricks to indicate Britishness without delving into the deeper structural differences between British and American English.
Naomi Medhurst
2025-04-19 02:44:09
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The word originated as the naval interjection “hoy!” (related to “ahoy”). “Oi” was originally associated with Cockney argot, and the first OED citation is a bit of dialect from the Evening Standard in 1937: “Oi, there’s a lidy ‘ere wants some juice on the knocker!” If the NFL has a forensic team working on the case, I would advise them to concentrate their efforts in Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, and South Africa, because that, according to Wikipedia, is where people say “oi.” You can hear it shouted in streets and sporting events of Commonwealth countries, especially Australia, where “Aussie! Aussie! Aussie! Oi! Oi! Oi!” is a popular chant. But you don’t hear it in the U.S. According to the OED, the word has since provided the name to a British punk-rock subgenre and more generally gone mainstream.
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