Somehow I doubt Alex Trebek actually just said “T4zxk!”
Dear Word Detective: I was listening to NPR Morning Edition the other day when this word was used several times in describing an Iraqi crowd’s reaction to something in Iraq. I spell it here phonetically since I cannot find it in my Webster’s New World College Dictionary, Fourth Edition, 2001. The word is pronounced “you-you-late” (ululate? eululate?). — TAM.
Good question. That’s one of the problems with radio and television — you catch a word you’ve never heard before and then have to guess at its spelling if you want to look it up. Turning on the closed-captioning on TV is, as you may have noticed, usually worse than useless in such situations. It has been said that a room full of monkeys, given typewriters and enough time, will eventually reproduce the collected works of Shakespeare. In the meantime, they appear to be doing the captioning for American TV.
The word you’re looking for is indeed “ululate,” and I’m not sure why your edition of Merriam-Webster’s otherwise fine dictionary didn’t list it, because their website does. NPR’s pronunciation “you-you-late” is fine, but Merriam-Webster Online (m-w.com) recommends “uhl-you-late.”
Knowing NPR’s fondness for painting little “sound pictures,” I suspect that at some point in the report you heard they ran a few seconds of the crowd’s “ululation,” which probably sounded like a cross between high-pitched yodeling and wailing cries of anguish. “Ululation” is a cultural tradition in much of Africa and the Middle East, used to express both grief (as at funerals) and celebration. Ululation is also used in religious ceremonies as well as in several popular musical styles of the region, and shows up in the work of Western musical artists occasionally. Some of what Yoko Ono has produced (stop snickering, class) could be considered ululation.
“Ululate” first appeared in English in the early 17th century, drawn from the Latin “ululare,” meaning “to howl or wail.” The origin of the Latin word was what linguists call “echoic” or “imitative,” meaning that the sound of the word “ululate” itself was supposed to sound like the action of ululating.
