goo

n. Informal

1. A sticky wet viscous substance.
2. Sentimental drivel.

[Perhaps short for BURGOO.]

Origin: 1902

The twentieth century got off to a gooey start. There was goo in the colleges and goo in the inventor's workshop. A survey of slang at a hundred colleges and universities, published in 1900, found goo used at twenty of them to mean "any liquid" and at one, Elmira College, "anything sticky."

The American inventor Lee De Forest (1873-1961), later called "the father of radio," must have had those meanings in mind around the year 1902 when he invented a paste to coat the ends of wires and named it goo, as reported a year later. He also invented and patented the Audion, forerunner of the vacuum tube long used in radio and television. But while De Forest's Audion is obsolete, his goo has stuck with us.

Gooey was also reported in the 1900 college survey, but only from Ithaca College, where it was explained as "weird, making one creep." By 1903, however, gooey had adhered to goo and had taken on the meaning "sticky, not easily handled."

In fact, goo words seem to have been the rage in the 1900s. Goo-goo eyes, probably developed from the baby's goo-goo of the 1860s, is first recorded in 1897. Googly eyes, large and round, date from 1901. Those words are apparently unrelated to the liquid or sticky goo, but they seem to have become entangled. Sometimes goo itself, when especially gooey, was called goo-goo, as early as 1903. During World War I it began to be called goop as well.

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The noun has one meaning:

Meaning #1: any thick messy substance
  Synonyms: sludge, slime, gook, guck, gunk, muck, ooze

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Dansk (Danish)
n. - klister, klæbrig masse

Nederlands (Dutch)
kleverig goedje, overdreven sentimentaliteit

Français (French)
n. - substance collante, (fig) sentimentalité excessive

Deutsch (German)
n. - (ugs.) Schmiere, Schmalz

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - (ΗΠΑ, καθομ.) γλίνα, γλίτσα, οτιδήποτε γλοιώδες ή κολλώδες

Italiano (Italian)
melma

Português (Portuguese)
n. - substância (f) viscosa ou pegajosa (coloq.), linguagem (f) ou idéias (f pl) sentimentais

Русский (Russian)
что-л. липкое или вязкое, сентиментальщина

Español (Spanish)
n. - sustancia pegajosa, sentimentalismo

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - kladd, (sliskig) sentimentalitet

中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
粘性物, 感伤

中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 粘性物, 感傷

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 끈적대는 것, 감성, 다정 다감함

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 鳴き魚

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) مادة لزجه‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮חומר דביק, רגשנות, רגש חולני‬

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goo goo doll tickets	shoe goo
goo dolls	Electric Shaver With Goo