The name of a big American internet company, best known for its website — one of the first places people used to search the web, back in the 1990s, and still a place to read news, check email, look at share prices, sports results and the weather. In its early years it was the front door to the internet for millions of people; today Google does most of the searching, and Yahoo is more of a news and email site than a search engine. Two small things about the name. It is written with a capital Y and, properly, with an exclamation mark at the end — Yahoo! — though almost nobody types that mark in ordinary writing. And the same spelling without the capital is an ordinary English word, yahoo, meaning a rough, stupid, noisy person; it comes from a book, Gulliver's Travels, where the Yahoos are a savage human-like race. It is also a shout of joy — "Yahoo! We won!" The company's founders knew all this and picked the name partly as a joke; a story that the letters stand for a long phrase came afterwards.