Is anyone able to explain the history behind this cheer?
At the face of it I'm unsure how this could be a cheer as 加 translate to add/plus/apply and 油 translates to oil/fat/grease you would think that 加油 would translate to Add oil
Most of my research showed that 加油 means a cheer or add oil but I've been unable to find any information as to how it translate into a cheer
In a literal sense, 加油 means to step on the gas pedal when you drive a car.
Imagine what happens when you step on the gas pedal? More gasoline is added to the engine. What happens when more gasoline is added to the engine? The engine roarsssss!
If someone is having a hard time, they are like a car being stuck in the mud or a similar situation and unable to move forward. You would encourage them to "add in some gasoline" 加油!
In Thai, they use ‘chaiyo!’ [ไชโย] for cheers. Thai has borrowed a lot of vocabulary from Sanskrit and Pali, and ‘chaiyo’ is likely derived from the Sanskrit verb ‘jayati’ meaning ‘to win’. If the Mandarin term was borrowed from the same source (also likely in my view), it could have been written with various characters down through the centuries. The current 加油 would then be a kind of rationalization in order to make a foreign word seem native.
A more specific conjecture about the source form: Pali, the language of the Theravada Buddhist scriptures, has the following:
imassa jayo bhavissati 'Victory will be his.'
Jayo here is a deverbal noun in the nominative case: ‘victory.’ The form in Sanskrit would be identical in this context. As Sanskrit broadly speaking is the language of the Mahayana scriptures, this would most likely be the source for the Chinese word. 加油 is thus a transliteration, where the characters were chosen for their sound, not their meaning. Interpreting this as ‘add oil’ etc. is what linguists call folk etymology.
According to one source, the expression originally comes from racing, used in its most literal sense. Another source claims that it has its roots in 明代, in a family of expressions including "火上加油". Both agree, though, that "加油" became a general expression of encouragement through its metaphorical usage becoming more and more closely tied to the word by itself. There is nothing in the meaning of the constituent characters themselves, however, that conveys the meaning of encouragement. Not all Chinese words can have their current meaning explained in terms of their parts (like 肥皂).
Source alleging origins in racing: http://zhidao.baidu.com/link?url=yiP6iAc0S-3VMztyCR8dID7OYfAskDbfmR8_jBZ0Zs9RXweUeYBLpzRYnNBNU5PyNcOLgyrxMKTaWGb49G3Xpa Source alleging origins in 明代: http://www.xiexingcun.com/yuwenjianshe/ywjs2009/ywjs20090125.html
在明代，已经发现了一个“加油2”的用例 is only 武宗逸史 -- obviously the author of that paper mistook the year of this novel. It was not written in Ming Dynasty but just in the years of Republic of China, so it cannot support that claim.
I'm pretty sure it's just one of those terms that became viral and it's suppose to be synonymous with a car. So the origin cannot predate the invention of automobiles. 加油 is used cause it's sounds better than using the word 加力 and etc... (And 加力 is used to mean something else). And it's often used during competitions, so it's appropriate because drag racing.
“Add oil” – what does it mean?
It represents the metaphor of injecting fuel into a tank, or alternatively, stepping on an accelerator to propel a vehicle forward. But the use of “add oil” as an expression of encouragement is a creation of Cantonese: ga yao, or jiayou in Mandarin. Often accompanied by exclamation marks, it is a versatile phrase Chinese speakers use to express encouragement, incitement or support, somewhere along the lines of “keep it up” or “good luck”. It is believed to have originated as a cheer at the Macau Grand Prix during the 1960s.
