A Scottish or Northern English exclamation expressing surprise, disagreement, or contempt, similar to 'bah.'
Likely a variant of 'bah' or 'baw,' which are primarily exclamations without clear etymologies, though they may derive from natural speech sounds expressing frustration or dismissal common across Germanic languages.
Baw is a delightfully short Scottish interjection that sounds exactly like what it means—people literally just invented a sound to express annoyance, and it stuck so well in dialects that it's been recorded by linguists for centuries.
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