Two things happened to me that made me want to look into the word hype.

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I was listening to a podcast talking about hyperbole in advertising, and I saw an item from Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary this time on an older form of hyp.

As I walked my dog and listened to the podcast I thought “ah, the word hype must come from hyperbole” since to me the meaning of the word hype fits perfectly with advertising.

The New Oxford American Dictionary says that hype is “extravagant or intensive publicity or promotion.”

Compare that to Merriam-Webster’s definition for hyperbole “extravagant exaggeration that represents something as much greater or less, better or worse, or more intense than it really is.”

So imagine my surprise when I cracked open my Oxford English Dictionary only to find that

(a) this use of hype is so recent the OED doesn’t yet have an entry for this meaning, and

(b) the etymology doesn’t come from hyperbole.

The first entry for hype comes as a noun in 1924 as a slang term for a “drug addict” shortened from hypodermic.

Almost simultaneously hype appeared in 1926 meaning “to cheat” or “a cheater,” someone who gives you back the wrong change.

Although drug addicts may also be cheats the OED says this “cheating” meaning has an unknown etymology.

Then by 1936 to hype something is to “stimulate” it or “work it up” as if it had been injected with some drug.

Now at least we see the roots of advertising hype in this “work it up” meaning.

I see that The American Heritage Dictionary suspects the etymology to be “partly from hype, a swindle … and partly from [hyperbole]” which makes sense to me.

When we look at the background of the word hyper, as a kid might become when he’s eaten three bowls of sugared cereal, we see that it instead of coming from this “worked up” drug etymology, is thought to stem from an abbreviation of hyperactive.

That hyper first showed up in 1942 but there was an earlier word hyper with citations from 1914 which shows us why the etymologists didn’t connect the cheating hype with the drug addict hype. Hyper had at that earlier date been “Criminal Slang…current amongst money-changers. A flim-flammer.”

All of these citations are within the last hundred years but as I said at the beginning, what got me going, was in part a nugget from more like 250 years ago.

As the organizers put it, the photoblog Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary is

“posted each day for readers’ lexiconic delight…words [are] taken from the annotated proof copy of the first edition, extra-illustrated with Johnson’s and his helpers’ manuscript corrections.”

All of which means you can see how The Doctor corrected mistakes and made notes to himself.

His entry for hyp is of quite a different sort than our more modern versions.  In his day to hyp was not to “work up” but instead “to depress” and as he put it was “barbarously contracted from hypochondriack.”

What this all means is that although we think of hype and hyper as both meaning something amplified or revved up, etymologically only hyper comes from this meaning.  Hype, whether from hypochondriac or hypodermic etymologically comes from the opposite direction; from “down,” or “lower.”

Hypo means “under” and in hypodermic means “under the skin.”