Kevin
November 23, 2020
What is The Past Tense of...
If you are not a linguist too familiar with the slang words from 2014-2018, you might be curious about the past tense of yeet. This article will cover the past tense but also will cover the definition, history, how it spread through our culture and more.
Compose bold, clear, mistake-free, writing with Grammarly's AI-powered writing assistant
The word yeet is defined as:
Yeet is a trending strong verb word and is an exclamation of excitement, approval, surprise, or all-around energy, often as issued when doing a dance move or throwing something.
Yeet is used in similar ways to exclamations like “Yes!” or “Aight”. For example, you can say “yeet on” as an interjection or to express excitement.
Here are some conjugations of the word yeet:
These are loose as this is a slang word that doesn’t have strict grammatical rules of conjugation to follow.
| Present Tense | Simple Past Tense form/ Past Participle | Future |
| I yeet | yeeted/yote/ yate/ yought/ yaught/ yeeten | Am yeeting |
| You yeet | yeeted | Are yeeting |
| He, she, it yeets | yeeted | Is yeeting |
| We yeet | yeeted | Are yeeting |
| They yeet | yeeted | Are yeeting |
This is a slang word popularized among the youth of America since at least 2008. Since it’s not a word used outside of slang there is less about this word’s origin in the common sense. Urban Dictionary has an entry describing “yeet” as an excited exclamation, particularly in sports and sexual contexts. There is another entry on Urban Dictionary (users can submit their own definitions of slang words to the website) saying that “yeet” is an expression of approval.
In February 2014 the term yeet started to spread further through social media through a new dance. There is no known origin of the dance, many people claim to either have created it or know who did create it but it’s not exactly known whom credit is due. This is when the dance move started to really pick up traction, a song called “YEET” by the artist Quill was released and used yeet in a similar fashion as the above definition.
The word took off to stratospheric (and often annoying levels) as the youth began to use it frequently for any achievement in real life or games. Then another wave of memes and content sharing hit out of nowhere in 2016. A high school girl threw a water bottle down the hall at other classmates as she screamed “YEET”. This video shifted the meaning of the word “yeet” from an exclamation used similarly to “yes” to throwing objects at people (not with any malice) or even in sports contexts still like when dunking over another player.
Like all memes, the word slowly faded as new memes and slang replaced it from vocabulary and social media. Then in 2018, another unlikely wave hit once again as a Reddit post on r/dankmemes started a new genre of yeet memes. An example of that would be changing “delete” in the top photo to “deyeet” in the bottom photo.
Vine was a social media platform and app where users could upload a 6-second video. Vine started in June 2012, and quickly rose to become a top app on android and iOS. It was bought by Twitter in October 2012 for $30 million, they believed that the short-form videos were a perfect match to their short text posts on their service.
The execs at Twitter quickly realized that instead of having it be a way for users to just upload videos to friends and family, instead, it was going to be used for more creative and comedic purposes. They never could have seen how popular this app would become and how many followers users would amass.
What could have gone wrong for vine with such a loyal following building and videos and users getting millions of views and follows? The app struggled to monetize the app and users were not being paid for what they felt was their work of adding good content regularly to their app.
These power users began to look to Facebook, Instagram (who just added short videos around this time) and Youtube where they would have more reception and be able to make money for themselves. Many “Vine Stars” (as they are colloquially known) are now very famous YouTubers who make more than a decent living for themselves now that they switched platforms.
To understand how YEET became such a common slang word (especially from 2014 on) you must understand the numbers of people that were on Vine. When something went viral on Vine at the time, it instantly made its way into the youth’s culture of the time.
In 2014 viral Vine user Jas Nicole uploaded a video of a guy by the nickname “Lil Meatball” doing the yeet dance mentioned above to the song “YEET” by Quill and it started an avalanche of people sharing it and remixes of this video. People creatively added drumsticks to his hands or gave him a baseball bat. This meme culture allowed a word that was used here and there but wasn’t mainstream slang, to be used and seen by millions of people all at once.
Throw
Hurl
Yes
Exclamation:
Verb:
Next time you need to write the word yeet, you will be well prepared for everything you need to know what it is and how to use it efficiently. You should feel confident with the different conjugations, the history of the word, and the definition.
