gung-ho

Exceptionally enthusiastic, eager, or zealous, sometimes overly so. There are plenty of pitfalls that gung-ho entrepreneurs don't stop to consider. I was all gung-ho about this graduate program when I first began, but I must admit that I've grown sick and tired of these boring lectures.

Inf. enthusiastically in favor of something. Bobby is really gung ho on his plan to start his own company.

Also, gung-ho. Extremely enthusiastic or dedicated, as in She was gung ho about her new job. This expression was introduced in 1942 as a training slogan for a U.S. Marine battalion, derived from what an American officer thought were Mandarin Chinese words for "work together." It was actually an abbreviation for the name of Chinese industrial cooperatives.

Very enthusiastic, dedicated to the task at hand; also, overzealous. The term, also spelled gung ho, comes from a Chinese phrase meaning “work together,” adopted as the name for small producer cooperatives organized in the late 1930s to help the Chinese economy during the Chinese-Japanese war. The term was then adopted by Marine Lieutenant Evans F. Carlson for his battalion of volunteers, Carlson’s Raiders, formed just after Pearl Harbor. In 1943 a war movie dramatizing one of the Raiders’ early victories was entitled Gung Ho! and the term caught on. In the military, however, it also came to be applied to an offensively ardent follower of rules and regulations. Richard Martin Stern had an early civilian usage, “In those days he was very gung ho for National Socialism” (The Kesssler Legacy, 1968).