After reading the posts above, I began thinking, "what is a Hoya"? When I found this in Wilkepedia, I saw that the question is redundant: ]"What is a Hoya" The University admits that the precise origin of the term "Hoya" is unknown. [1] The official story is that at some point prior to 1920, students well-versed in the classical languages invented the Greek hoia or hoya, meaning "what" or "such", and the Latin saxa, to form "What Rocks!" Depending on who tells the story, the "rocks" either refer to the baseball team, which was nicknamed the "Stonewalls" after the Civil War, to the stalwart defense of the football team, or to the stone wall that surrounded the campus. [2] In 1920, students began publishing the campus's first regular newspaper under the name The Hoya, after successfully petitioning Rev. Coleman Nevils, S.J., Dean of the College, to change the name of the young paper, which was originally to be known as The Hilltopper. By the fall of 1928, the newspaper had taken to referring to the sports teams (then called the Hilltoppers in reference to Georgetown's geography) as the Hoyas. Dean Nevils's former school, College of the Holy Cross, also refers to the term "Hoya" in one of its fight songs, as does a third Jesuit school, Marquette University. Big East opponents, whose schools tend to have more concrete nicknames, have long used "What's a Hoya?" as a chant to mock Georgetown. [3] Later