Where Did the Expression ‘Gung Ho’ Come From?

When someone says they’re “gung ho” about something, they tend to mean they’re especially enthusiastic or dedicated to it, or have no qualms or hesitancy in their willingness to do something.

If you think that expression doesn’t look like it originated in English, you’d be right. Gung ho is a form of a Mandarin Chinese expression, gōnghé, which was in turn clipped from the name of the Chinese Industrial Cooperative Society, or Zhōngguó Gōngyè Hézuò Shè. Gung ho is therefore effectively a Chinese acronym: the gung comes from the first part of gōng yè (工业, “industry”), while the ho comes from the first part of hezuo (合作, “cooperative”).

But how did that name come to be used to mean “enthusiastic”? The answer lies with a decorated U.S. military figure named Evans Fordyce Carlson.

Born in New York in 1896, Carlson enlisted in the U.S. Army in the early 1900s (and was awarded a Purple Heart for his service in Europe during the First World War) before joining the Marines in 1922. By the time the Second World War broke out, Carlson was a highly respected and well-established military figure in the United States (and a close friend of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his family) with almost two decades of service in the Marines under his belt—several years of which had been spent on three tours of duty in China.

It was during those decades in China that Carlson encountered the Industrial Cooperative, or Zhōngguó Gōngyè Hézuò Shè. And, having studied a little Mandarin, he picked up on the term gōng yè in particular, which he interpreted (incorrectly) as meaning “working together.”

As the Second World War raged in the early 1940s Carlson became one of a handful of high-ranking officers put in charge of a series of elite battalions known as the Marine Raiders. Looking for a motto with which to rally and encourage his troops (known as “Carlson’s Raiders”), Carlson ultimately returned to gōng yè—or rather his anglicized version of it, gung ho. The term soon became an expression of military enthusiasm and zealousness among his men.

“I was trying to build up the same sort of working spirit I had seen in China where all the soldiers dedicated themselves to one idea and worked together to put that idea over,” Carlson explained to Life magazine in 1943. “I told the boys about it again and again. I told them of the motto of the Chinese Co-Operatives, Gung Ho. It means Work Together—Work in Harmony. … My motto caught on and they began to call themselves the Gung Ho Battalion.”

From there, the word quickly entered wider currency among the U.S. military, and the 1943 movie Gung Ho!: The Story of Carlson's Makin Island Raiders exposed it to an even wider English-speaking audience. Gung ho has remained in use as a byword for any especially enthusiastic or eager attitude ever since.

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