WORD OF THE DAY: VAMOOSE
verb|vuh-MOOSS
What It Means
Vamoose is an informal word that means “to depart quickly.”
// With the sheriff hot on their tails, the bank robbers knew they had better vamoose.
Examples of VAMOOSE
“… I spotted the culprit, a young racoon, attempting to dislodge one of my feeders. Caught in the act, he ran for his life when I opened the window and told him to vamoose.” — Margaret Haylock Capon, The Picton County Weekly News (Ontario, Canada), 19 June 2025.
Did You Know?
In the 1820s and ’30s, the American Southwest was rough-and-tumble territory—the true Wild West. English-speaking cowboys, Texas Rangers, and gold prospectors regularly rubbed elbows with Spanish-speaking vaqueros in the local saloons, and a certain amount of linguistic intermixing was inevitable. One Spanish term that caught on with English speakers was vamos, which means “let’s go.” Cowpokes and dudes alike adopted the word, at first using a range of spellings and pronunciations that varied considerably in their proximity to the original Spanish form. But when the dust settled, the version most American English speakers were using was vamoose.
Merriam Webster Dictionary
