Hoopla
noun ·Uncommon ·College level
Definitions
- 1 A bustling to-do, excited speech or noise. countable, uncountable
"Say you don't know me, or recognize my face / Say you don't care who goes to that kind of place / Knee deep in the hoopla, sinking in your fight / Too many runaways eating up the night"
- 2 blatant or sensational promotion wordnet
- 3 A carnival game in which the player attempts to throw hoops around pegs. countable, uncountable
Example
More examples"Say you don't know me, or recognize my face / Say you don't care who goes to that kind of place / Knee deep in the hoopla, sinking in your fight / Too many runaways eating up the night"
Etymology
Earlier houp-la, hoop la, first attested in c. 1877, probably from French houp-là, oup-là (“upsadaisy, upsy-daisy”), a cry to various animals close to humans like horses and dogs, of likely onomatopoeic origin (but see là). Compare interjections like whoop, ahoy, hoo.
More for "hoopla"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.