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Oy vey (Yiddish: אױ װײ) is a Yiddish phrase expressing dismay or exasperation. Also spelled oy vay, oy veh, or oi vey, and often abbreviated to oy, the expression may be translated as "oh, woe!" or "woe is me!" Its Hebrew equivalent is oy vavoy (אוי ואבוי, óy va'avóy).
This is a list of words that have entered the English language from the Yiddish language, many of them by way of American English.There are differing approaches to the romanization of Yiddish orthography (which uses the Hebrew alphabet); thus, the spelling of some of the words in this list may be variable (for example, shlep is a variant of schlep, and shnozz, schnoz).
Altenmann, I'm not sure about oy gevalt. The only one of our dictionaries that mentioned it is MW, and it labels it with the heading "Yiddish phrase", which suggests it's not claiming oy gevalt has actually been borrowed into English. Contrast this with MW's treatment of oy vey, which is simply labeled "interjection".
Leslie Felperin, reviewing the film for The Hollywood Reporter, dubbed it as "Oy gevalt!", and opined: "So muddled and misbegotten it’s hard to perform an evidential postmortem, based strictly on one viewing, of where it all goes wrong."
The Joys of Yiddish is a book containing a lexicon of common words and phrases of Yinglish—i.e., words originating in the Yiddish language that had become known to speakers of American English due to the influence of American Ashkenazi Jews.
Well, to me, the 'oy' is plausible enough to be included, as a note at least, but the 'avoy' is definitely too much of a stretch. There are no sources indicating that "oy avoy" was ever used as a phrase prior to the Yiddish "oy vey", and there are no sources indicating an evolution of the word "avoy" to "vey".
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Oi / ɔɪ / is an interjection used in various varieties of the English language, particularly Australian English, British English, Indian English, Irish English, New Zealand English, and South African English, as well as non-English languages such as Chinese, Tagalog, Tamil, Hindi/Urdu, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, and Portuguese to get the attention of another person or to express surprise ...