Wo

Part of speech: interjection, noun

Definitions

1. A spoken command, mainly used with horses, telling an animal to halt ; an old spelling of woe, meaning grief or sorrow
2. An interjection shouted to bring a horse or other animal to a stop ; a dated variant of the word for deep sadness or distress
3. A call used to make a draft animal stand still ; an archaic term for suffering, misery, or a feeling of great sorrow

Etymology: "Wo" is less a word of its own than a spelling it shares with two much more familiar ones. It is a variant of "who" and of "woe," the word for sorrow, so on an older page it may be either of those in a different spelling. Its ancestry reaches further back. The source connects the family to Old English "wāg," meaning a wall or partition, and to the Scots forms "wauch" and "vauch," which are cognate with it. Earlier spellings such as "woh" and "wouh" belong to the same group of variants.