Entry · catalog no. 1169
biggety
/ /ˈbɪɡəti/ /BIG-uh-tee
adjective · Georgia, Florida, the Carolinas, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Tennessee, Arkansas — and carried north with the Great Migration · 1870s
✓ Verified
1.
Conceited; swollen with a sense of one's own importance; behaving as though one outranks the people one is standing among. The word is almost never a compliment. It carries a specific social charge that plain conceited does not: to call somebody biggety is to say they have forgotten their people, gotten above themselves, and need bringing down. Zora Neale Hurston used it exactly that way, glossing the folk warning go when the wagon comes as a caution that you may be acting biggety now, but you will cool down when enough power gets behind you.
“He came back from up North talking biggety, and nobody in that kitchen was impressed.”
2.
By extension, forward or impudent — presuming on a familiarity or an authority one has not been granted. In this sense it attaches often to children and to subordinates who talk back, and in the Jim Crow South it was also used against Black people by whites who read ordinary self-respect as insolence.
“Don't get biggety with your grandmother.”
Origin & Attribution
Biggety belongs to Black Southern speech and shows up in the written record in the 1870s. The Oxford English Dictionary earliest evidence is an 1878 issue of the Daily Constitution in Atlanta. Three years later Joel Chandler Harris put it in the mouth of Uncle Remus in Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings (1881), and in January 1884 the linguist James A. Harrison listed it in the Specimen Negroisms glossary of his article Negro English in the German journal Anglia — to talk biggity, meaning to talk big, to order. Harris and Harrison were white men transcribing Black speech, which is why the Black-authored citations matter more: Charles W. Chesnutt uses it in The Goophered Grapevine in 1887, Paul Laurence Dunbar in 1902, and Zora Neale Hurston repeatedly — in Sweat (1926), in Mules and Men (1935), and inside the glossary attached to Story in Harlem Slang in the American Mercury in July 1942, where it appears not as a headword but as the plain-English word she reaches for to explain other terms. Green's Dictionary of Slang labels it originally US Black, and its distribution across the Black South supports that. One honest complication: the Dictionary of American Regional English notes an English dialect word bigotty, recorded in Notes and Queries in 1873, meaning bumptious or overbearing, and suggests both words may descend from bigot. That does not dislodge the Black Southern attribution, but it means the origin is a strong claim rather than a settled one.
1878
Earliest documented use, in the Daily Constitution, Atlanta — the OED's first evidence
1884
Listed in James A. Harrison's Specimen Negroisms glossary in Anglia: to talk biggity, meaning to talk big, to order
1935
Hurston prints it in Mules and Men: don't git biggity nobody and let yuh head start more than yo' rump kin stan'
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
Nationwide
Georgia, Florida, the Carolinas, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Tennessee, Arkansas — and carried north with the Great Migration · 1870s
Spoken by
Black Southerners across the rural South and the migration cities; recorded by Chesnutt, Dunbar and Hurston, and by white writers transcribing Black speech
$BIGGETThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Enduring148 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
61/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1878
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
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Citations & Sources
■
Charles W. Chesnutt, The Goophered Grapevine (1887), collected in The Conjure Woman (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1899), p. 23
book · printed
■
Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1935), p. 171
book · printed
■
Zora Neale Hurston, Story in Harlem Slang, The American Mercury, July 1942
magazine · printed
■
James A. Harrison, Negro English, Anglia, January 1884 — Specimen Negroisms glossary
journal · printed
■
Joel Chandler Harris, Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings (New York: D. Appleton, 1881), p. 69
book · printed
■
+ Cite a sourceDictionary of American Regional English, entry biggity adj.; Oxford English Dictionary, entry biggity adj., earliest evidence 1878
dictionary · online
See also