“Whoa” is hardly a new word; it dates back to at least the early 17 th century. At that time it was used mostly in shouted form and was intended to garner the attention of someone in the distance.

While whoa is the original spelling, woah has come in use only in recent years. The earliest evidence of the spelling woah is believed to come from online message boards in the early 1980s. The ...

Whoa, if true: A brief history of News Twitter’s favorite phrase It is one of the most common sarcastic responses to weird, exaggerated, and impossible news stories. Eric Geller ...

I assumed that the inability to spell “whoa” was a new phenomenon. It was definitely new to me. Had I come across “woah” or “whoah” in the past, I would have noticed. I’m sure of it.