Entry · catalog no. 2520
arabber
/ /ˈeɪræbər/ /AY-rab-ber
noun · Baltimore — West and East Baltimore stables · 1800s
✓ Verified
1.
A street vendor who sells fruit and vegetables from a horse-drawn cart, working a route through the neighborhoods and drawing customers with a sung or chanted call advertising the produce. The cart is hand-painted; the horse wears a bell harness, so the route is announced by sound before anyone sees it. Arabbers have long served as mobile grocers for neighborhoods with no supermarket.
“You could hear the arabber coming up the block before you saw the horse.”
Origin & Attribution
Baltimore, Maryland. The trade goes back to the early nineteenth century, when port access and stable access made cart vending one of the few open doors into working for yourself. Black men entered it in large numbers after the Civil War, and by the twentieth century arabbing was an overwhelmingly Black occupational tradition organized around the stables on Retreat Street, Carlton Street and Fremont Avenue. It is classed as a primarily African American folk tradition and it is still alive.
1989
Roland L. Freeman publishes The Arabbers of Baltimore; his own uncle was an arabber
1994
The Arabber Preservation Society is founded
2004
The documentary We Are Arabbers is released, built from interviews with working arabbers
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
Nationwide
Baltimore — West and East Baltimore stables · 1800s
Spoken by
Black working-class Baltimore; the stable communities and the neighborhoods on their routes
$ARABBEThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Fading226 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
35/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1800
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.
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Atlanta, GA
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Memphis, TN
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Citations & Sources
■
Roland L. Freeman, The Arabbers of Baltimore (Tidewater Publishers)
1989
■
We Are Arabbers, dir. Scott and Joy Kecken
2004
■
+ Cite a sourceJohn McIntyre, "Here's where the word 'arabber' came from," Baltimore Sun
2018
See also