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  • (verb) - Hoyt, or hoit, is to act the romp or hoyden. Winsome and spirited maids go hoyting across the English stage of the seventeenth century. Hoity-toity is an expansion of the same word and originally applied to frolicsome women. The meaning of hoity-toity was altered to become an expression of petulance and surprised disgust, in which function it remains common. The verb to hoit almost disappeared. It is a pity, as it went well with the racing and chasing of "delightfull girles" in an anonymous poem of 1675, The Chase: So ran, so sang, so hoyted the moone's maids/Light as young leverettes greyhounds skip their buskin'd feet,/Spurning th' enamell'd sward grass as they did fleet. --Ivor Brown's Book of Words, 1944

    April 22, 2018