From Richard Nordquist,
Your Guide to Grammar & Composition.
FREE Newsletter. Sign Up Now!

Definition:

The part of speech that usually expresses emotion and is capable of standing alone.

Etymology:

From the Latin, "thrown in"

Examples and Observations:

• "When I hear the hypercritical quarreling about grammar and style, the position of the particles, etc., etc., stretching or contracting every speaker to certain rules of theirs. I see that they forget that the first requisite and rule is that expression shall be vital and natural, as much as the voice of a brute or an interjection: first of all, mother tongue; and last of all, artificial or father tongue. Essentially your truest poetic sentence is as free and lawless as a lamb's bleat."
  (Henry David Thoreau)



• "Well!"
  (Jack Benny)



• "Psst! h'm! ah! oh! hem! ah! ha! hey! well! oh! pooh! poof! ow! oo! ouch! hey! eh! h'm! pffft!
  
  "Well! hey! pooh! oh! h'm! right!"
  (Raymond Queneau, "Interjections," Exercises in Style, translated by Barbara Wright, New Directions: 1981)



• "Yabba dabba do!"
  (Fred Flintstone in The Flinstones)



• "It hit me like a ton of bricks, and I had to almost hide my face, because tears were welling up in my eyes. Just the thought of playing with Bird, wow!"
  (Herbie Hancock)



• "I¹m much bigger in Britain than I am there. I'm well-known, but my name's 'That Guy' in America. . . . People shout: 'Hey!­ I know you! You're That Guy.'"
  (Billy Connolly)



• "Hoo-ah!"
  (Al Pacino as Colonel Frank Slade in Scent of a Woman)



• "M'm! M'm! Good!"
  (Campbell's Soup advertising sloagn)



• "Aye, yii, yii, yiiii,
  I am the Frito Bandito."
  (1970s television commercial for Frito's Corn Chips)



• "Cowabunga"
  (Chief Thunderbird in The Howdy Doody Show and Bart Simpson in The Simpsons)



• "Bam!"
  Chef Emeril Lagasse)



• "Woo-hoo," "Yoink!" and "D'oh"
  (Homer Simpson in The Simpsons)

Pronunciation: in-tur-JEK-shun