"holy moley" meaning in English

See holy moley in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Interjection

Audio: en-au-holy moley.ogg [Australia] Forms: holy moley ! [canonical]
Etymology: Originally a euphemism for Holy Mary, Molly being a nickname for Mary. Compare holy Moses. Etymology templates: {{m|en|Holy Mary}} Holy Mary, {{m|en|Molly}} Molly, {{m|en|holy Moses}} holy Moses Head templates: {{en-interj|head=holy moley!}} holy moley!
  1. (idiomatic, dated, humorous or euphemistic) Synonym of wow, an expression of surprise. Tags: dated, euphemistic, humorous, idiomatic Categories (topical): English minced oaths Synonyms: wow [synonym, synonym-of], holy moly

Alternative forms

Download JSON data for holy moley meaning in English (2.6kB)

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  "etymology_templates": [
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      "args": {
        "1": "en",
        "2": "Holy Mary"
      },
      "expansion": "Holy Mary",
      "name": "m"
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        "2": "Molly"
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      "args": {
        "1": "en",
        "2": "holy Moses"
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  "etymology_text": "Originally a euphemism for Holy Mary, Molly being a nickname for Mary. Compare holy Moses.",
  "forms": [
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  "pos": "intj",
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      "examples": [
        {
          "ref": "1892, Nathaniel Gould, Running it off; or, Hard hit",
          "text": "\"Whew !\" he whistled, softly; \"that's curious. Same name as the lady at our place. Suppose he should be her husband. Holy moley, what a game. I've made a discovery.",
          "type": "quotation"
        }
      ],
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      "id": "en-holy_moley-en-intj-0na7McE3",
      "links": [
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      "raw_glosses": [
        "(idiomatic, dated, humorous or euphemistic) Synonym of wow, an expression of surprise."
      ],
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      "ogg_url": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2e/En-au-holy_moley.ogg",
      "tags": [
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      "args": {
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      },
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      "name": "m"
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      "args": {
        "1": "en",
        "2": "holy Moses"
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      "expansion": "holy Moses",
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  ],
  "etymology_text": "Originally a euphemism for Holy Mary, Molly being a nickname for Mary. Compare holy Moses.",
  "forms": [
    {
      "form": "holy moley !",
      "tags": [
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      ]
    }
  ],
  "head_templates": [
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      "args": {
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  ],
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  "lang_code": "en",
  "pos": "intj",
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        "English idioms",
        "English interjections",
        "English lemmas",
        "English minced oaths",
        "English multiword terms",
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        "English terms with audio links",
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          "ref": "1892, Nathaniel Gould, Running it off; or, Hard hit",
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          "type": "quotation"
        }
      ],
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      ],
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        ]
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        "(idiomatic, dated, humorous or euphemistic) Synonym of wow, an expression of surprise."
      ],
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      "ogg_url": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2e/En-au-holy_moley.ogg",
      "tags": [
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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 2024-05-05 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-05-02 using wiktextract (f4fd8c9 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.