hubbub

The Oxford English Dictionary's earliest citation for hubbub is from 1555, in a pamphlet describing Ireland. Edmund Spenser, in A View of the State of Ireland (1596), described the Irish as crying 'Pharro! Pharro!' and 'Aboo! Aboo!' in battle — the traditional Irish battle cries. Some scholars connect hubbub to these cries: the word may derive from the Irish exclamatory sound 'ub ub ub,' used in battle and in grief.

The Irish word ubu, an exclamation of distress or war, or its variants ubbu-boo, was heard by English soldiers in Ireland and rendered phonetically as hubbub. The sound itself was being borrowed — English soldiers heard a noise they couldn't parse linguistically and transcribed it as best they could. The onomatopoeic quality of hubbub captures exactly that foreign noise.

By the end of the 16th century, hubbub was fully English, meaning a confused din, a tumultuous noise. Shakespeare used it: in The Winter's Tale, the shepherd speaks of a 'hubbub.' The word had traveled from an Irish battlefield to the London stage in a single generation.

The word's sound is part of its meaning: the doubled consonants, the repeated vowel, the bb in the middle — hubbub sounds like what it describes. This is why it survived. English keeps onomatopoeic words fiercely, especially for noise. The Irish origin was quickly forgotten; the sound remained.