Entry · catalog no. 1119
b-boy
/ /ˈbi ˌbɔɪ/ /BEE-boy
noun · The Bronx, New York · 1970s
✓ Verified
1.
A dancer who goes off during the break, the percussion-only passage a DJ stretches by cutting back and forth between two copies of the same record. The work runs through several registers — upright toprock, the drop, footwork and power moves on the floor, and the freeze that ends a run. The word describes a stance as much as a skill set: a b-boy answers challenges, dances against somebody inside a cypher, and gets judged by the crowd on the spot. Women and girls doing the same work are b-girls; both terms came up together.
“Herc dropped the break and every b-boy in the room pushed to the middle of the floor.”
Origin & Attribution
The Bronx, early-to-mid 1970s, at block parties and rec-room jams thrown for Black and Puerto Rican teenagers by Clive 'DJ Kool Herc' Campbell. Herc is credited with putting the term into circulation around 1974 for the kids who waited on his breaks — though he has personally rejected the tidy 'break boy equals the breaks on a record' story everyone repeats, tying the word instead to Black slang for somebody going off, hitting a breaking point. National press in 1983 and 1984 renamed the dance breakdancing and the dancers breakdancers, labels practitioners largely refuse; inside the culture the dance is breaking or rocking, and the dancer is a b-boy. The order matters: the dancers named themselves nearly a decade before television arrived and renamed them.
1973
Herc's August 11 party at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue; extended breaks give the dance its floor
1981
Sally Banes's 'Physical Graffiti' in the Village Voice puts b-boys into national print
1984
'Style Wars' airs on PBS on January 18, carrying breaking to a mass audience under the press's breakdancing label
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
The Northeast
The Bronx, New York · 1970s
Spoken by
Black and Puerto Rican teenagers in the Bronx, and the DJ and dance crews around them
$BBOYThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Steady52 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
78/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1974
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
@bxgriot
The Bronx, NY
@phillyanne
Philadelphia, PA
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Citations & Sources
■
Sally Banes, 'Physical Graffiti: Breaking Is Hard to Do,' The Village Voice, with photographs by Martha Cooper — April 22, 1981
article · published
■
+ Cite a source'Style Wars,' directed by Tony Silver with Henry Chalfant, 1983; PBS broadcast January 18, 1984
documentary · released
See also