“Shouty”

Sometimes a NOOB just slips right by me. That was the case with the word at the top of his post. I had definitely encountered it as an adjective meaning characterized by shouting, but didn’t think of it as notably British, rather one of a group of relatively newfangled y-ending epithets that includes “flirty,” “melty” (as in cheese), and “stinky” (which has largely replaced “smelly”). But Lynne Murphy, in her latest Separated by a Common Language blog post, enlightens me. As she points out, the word has been around for well over 100 years, but early uses tended to refer to a particular vocal quality, especially while singing. The OED quotes a 1914 book on choral technique: “There are a great majority of untrained voices, which may be roughly classified as follows:—weak and quavery, worn and tinny, harsh and shrill, strident, metallic, shouty, throaty, cavernous, hooty, scoopy, and nondescript.” As Google Ngram Viewer shows, widespread use took off around the turn of the twenty-first…