Entry · catalog no. 0036
aight
/ ˈaɪt /AYT
int. · national · 1990s
✓ Verified
1.
All right, compressed to one syllable. Works as agreement (aight, bet), as a greeting or check-in (you aight?), as a closing (aight, I'm gone), and — stretched out and dropped in pitch — as a warning that someone is about to be told something. Meaning is carried almost entirely by length and intonation.
“Aight, I'll be there at eight. — Aiiight now, don't play with me.”
Origin & Attribution
Black American vernacular, from the ordinary reduction of all right in African American English speech. The written form is younger than the spoken one; the Oxford English Dictionary's earliest recorded evidence is from Vibe in 1993, the magazine's first year, which is a fair marker of the point at which hip-hop journalism began setting Black speech down as it sounded rather than as it was spelled.
1993
Vibe launches; the OED's earliest recorded evidence for the written form dates from it
1990s-2000s
Hip-hop, film and television carry the spelling into general written use
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
Nationwide
national · 1990s
Spoken by
Black Americans nationally
$AIGHTThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Steady33 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
75/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1993
in the culture
Cultural energy indexed from documented usage, search interest, and citation frequency. The recorded date is the archive’s permanent point of record.
Hear it spoken
By region — how it actually sounds
@auntiereg
Atlanta, GA
@deltasoul
Memphis, TN
Contribute your pronunciation
Citations & Sources
■
Oxford English Dictionary, "aight, adj. & int." — earliest recorded evidence 1993, in Vibe
text · dictionary
■
+ Cite a sourceVibe, first published 1993, Quincy Jones and Time Inc.
text · magazine
See also