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ENGLISH · A WORD WITH POSSIBILITIES

YOLO.

To make the most of the present moment.

4 characters2 syllables approx.English language

Meaning & usage

verb/ˈjəʊləʊ/UK/ˈjoʊloʊ/US
  1. To make the most of the present moment.

Where this word comes from

The phrase (not the acronym) "you only live once" dates to the 19th century according to research by Katherine Martin, head of U.S. Dictionaries at Oxford University Press. It saw a steady increase of usage from 1940 to 2000. Ben Zimmer, lexicographer, found the earliest usage of the acronym from 1993, in a trademark filed for YOLO gear with "you only live once" in small lettering. The acronym was popularized around 2011 by Canadian rapper Drake. YOLO was entered into the Oxford English Dictionary as a word on September 12, 2016.

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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.

Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.