“oof” is commonly recognized as a sound from the popular multiplayer game Roblox, it’s an onomatopoeia that describes how it feels to get the wind knocked out of you, although in the game It was actually the sound made when a Robloxian died.
It then became an internet meme and could be seen being used in the in-game chats. However its definition was not clear and it was used to mean a number of different things. It then spread as the players (and more people, as the meme got momentum) started to use the word as everyday parlance. Examples of its use included whenever they got embarrassed, defeated, frustrated, rebuffed, learned bad news, or were otherwise dealt a blow.
So what is its origin? Well strangely enough “oof”, originates from 19th Century English and can still be found in dictionaries. The sound implies a response to unexpected events, dissatisfactions of various kinds and more. Look it up, its pretty interesting!
But back to today! As its popularity rose, so the creativity of avid users came to surface. The result was we now have a whole host of meanings associated with the “oof”. Some are very general whilst others are known and used only by professionals in certain industries. Here are some of them:
- “oof” can refer to a pleasure or a relief, sometimes used in place of “My God!” or “Oh my Lord!”
- In social media, “oof” often works an acronym for Out of office.
- In legal terms “oof” refers to order of forfeiture
- “oof” is also used as abbreviation to denote a meaning of sentence in professional environments such as in the below examples:
- OOF: Object Oriented Filtering
- OOF: Open office formula
- OOF : Out of fiber
- OOF : Out of office
- OOF : Object oriented formula
- OOF : Out of focus
- OOF : Out of frame
- OOF : Other official flows
- OOF : Out of facility
- OOF : Object-oriented fortran
- OOF : Object-oriented framework
- OOF : Out-of-office feature
- OOF : Out of funding
- OOF : Options on futures
- OOF : Out of freeze
- OOF : Object of functionality
