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Gung Who?

A phrase with an unlikely origin story.

Leo Dong

Leo Dong

23 Aug 2025
Gung Who?
Photo by Joel Rivera-Camacho / Unsplash

The Americanism "gung ho" depicts an enthusiastic mindset, bordering on the reckless. It seems so ingrained in US culture, but it's surprisingly just a poorly pronounced Chinese phrase gōnghé,[1] meaning "work together", introduced to a US Marine Corps Major by a Kiwi communist.[2]


  1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gung_ho. ↩︎

  2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rewi_Alley. ↩︎

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