alley-oop

In basketball, why is a high pass that is caught in midair and dunked called an alley-oop?

The phrase alley-oop existed at least three decades before it became standard basketball jargon. It arose around World War I, most likely a coinage by American soldiers imitating the French: they combined the French word allez (meaning "you go") with a stylized pronunciation of the word "up," oop, spoken as if with a French accent. The words combined to essentially mean "up you go!"; the original use of the phrase alley-oop was an exclamation uttered upon lifting something heavy.

In the late 1950s, alley-oop was adopted by basketball players to denote the impressive acrobatic assist+dunk invented by San Francisco 49er Y. A. Tittle—not a poor choice for a name, considering the phrase's original meaning.

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