yo-yo [E20th] Crazes for particular toys are nothing new. In the late 1920s the yo-yo was the latest thing. Although toys resembling yo-yos were known in ancient China and Greece, the name probably comes from the Philippines, where the yo-yo had been popular for hundreds of years. It entered English in 1915, and became a verb meaning ‘to move up and down, fluctuate’ in the 1960s.