In Search of the Source of "Ballyhoo". An Interim Report

For what these two ballyhoos are, let us go to M. M. Mathews's Dictionary of Americanisms (hereinafter called DA), for it has the earliest citations for both. First, we find a quotation from 1836 (under ballyhoo, i), in which the word is used to refer to a kind of ship. Next, the DA records the word balao (with the variant spellings ballaho and ballyhoo) as the name of a small Caribbean garfish, the halfbeak. The DA's first citation for balao (Sp. baldo) is dated 1896, for ballaho treated as a spelling variant of balao and therefore having the same accent, 1867, and for ballyhoo, 1922. In other words, the DA has a record of this fish under one of these names since 1867. In addition to these two often-mentioned ballyhoos, the DA has a lone citation from 1880 for the word ballyhoo as it occurs in the name of an imaginary comic bird called the ballyhoo bird, but I shall discuss this later. The ship and the fish are found in the Caribbean and in the Gulf of Mexico, and pursuit of the problem immediately centers on these areas. Let me summarize what I have found in various dictionaries and other books

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