"doo-wop" meaning in English

See doo-wop in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Noun

Etymology: Coined by DJ Gus Gossert in the 1970s, referring to (mostly) white rock-and-roll groups of the late 1950s and early 1960s. The name is onomatopoeic, representing the nonlexical backing vocals of some songs of the genre. Etymology templates: {{coin|en|Gus Gossert|in=the 1970s|nobycat=1|occ=DJ|w=-}} Coined by DJ Gus Gossert in the 1970s, {{onomatopoeic|en|nocap=1}} onomatopoeic Head templates: {{en-noun|-}} doo-wop (uncountable)
  1. A style of vocal-based rhythm and blues music that was mostly popular within Black Americans of African descent in the mid-1950s to the early 1960s that is best characterized by nonsensical backing vocals with very little to no instrumentation. Tags: uncountable Categories (topical): Musical genres Derived forms: doo-wop progression
    Sense id: en-doo-wop-en-noun-vdk~E~7H Disambiguation of Musical genres: 92 8 Categories (other): English entries with incorrect language header, English entries with topic categories using raw markup, English onomatopoeias, English terms with non-redundant non-automated sortkeys Disambiguation of English entries with incorrect language header: 91 9 Disambiguation of English entries with topic categories using raw markup: 91 9 Disambiguation of English onomatopoeias: 87 13 Disambiguation of English terms with non-redundant non-automated sortkeys: 90 10
The following are not (yet) sense-disambiguated
Synonyms: doowop [rare], doo wop

Verb

Forms: doo-wops [present, singular, third-person], doo-wopping [participle, present], doo-wopped [participle, past], doo-wopped [past]
Etymology: Coined by DJ Gus Gossert in the 1970s, referring to (mostly) white rock-and-roll groups of the late 1950s and early 1960s. The name is onomatopoeic, representing the nonlexical backing vocals of some songs of the genre. Etymology templates: {{coin|en|Gus Gossert|in=the 1970s|nobycat=1|occ=DJ|w=-}} Coined by DJ Gus Gossert in the 1970s, {{onomatopoeic|en|nocap=1}} onomatopoeic Head templates: {{en-verb|++}} doo-wop (third-person singular simple present doo-wops, present participle doo-wopping, simple past and past participle doo-wopped)
  1. To perform music in this style.
    Sense id: en-doo-wop-en-verb-rp1T1PP5
The following are not (yet) sense-disambiguated
Synonyms: doowop [rare], doo wop

Inflected forms

Alternative forms

Download JSON data for doo-wop meaning in English (3.9kB)

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This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-04-30 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-04-21 using wiktextract (210104c and c9440ce). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.

If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.