Entry · catalog no. 1161
blicky
/ /ˈblɪki/ /BLIK-ee
noun · Brooklyn (Flatbush, East New York, Canarsie), Queens, the Bronx; Newark and Paterson; North and West Philadelphia; Detroit · 2010s
✓ Verified
1.
A pistol. In practice the word covers any handgun a person actually carries — most often a semi-automatic with an extended magazine, sometimes a converted or switch-fitted one. Unlike older gun words that lean on a make or a caliber, blicky names the object by feel: something small, on you, ready. It travels with a small set of fixed collocations — you hold one, keep one tucked, or have one on you — and it turns up as an attributive in crew names and tags. It is neutral in-group vocabulary, not a boast on its own; the boast is in what surrounds it.
“He ain t going nowhere without that blicky tucked.”
2.
As an interjection or ad-lib, blicka (also blicky, usually doubled or tripled) imitates the report of gunfire, dropped into a bar the way brrt or grrah is. Whether the noun grew out of this ad-lib or the ad-lib out of the noun is genuinely unsettled; both are attested in the same decade and the same scenes.
“Blicka, blicka — that is all you hear when them boys pull up.”
Origin & Attribution
Black American, and specifically Northeastern. The documentary record puts it in US mouths first: Green Dictionary of Slang dates its earliest citation for blickie to a US Urban Dictionary entry of 28 December 2008, and its earliest UK citation to Central Cee in 2021 — thirteen years later. It surfaces in a Detroit verse in 2014 before it becomes a signature of Brooklyn drill, where 22Gz Flatbush crew took the variant Blixky as a name and 6ix9ine Gummo (2017) carried it to the Hot 100. Correction: Dictionary.com 2018 entry floats the guess that the gun sense is an American corruption of the early 2000s UK slang blitz, and several sites now assert flatly that the word came from UK drill and crossed the Atlantic westward. That gets the direction backwards. Tony Thorne April 2018 UK drill glossary — compiled at King College London at the height of the UK scene — has no blick or blicky entry at all. The word went out from the US, not into it. It should also not be confused with the unrelated British colorist slur blick.
2008
First dated lexicographic citation, in Green Dictionary of Slang under blickie
2014
Danny Brown blicka line on Detroit vs. Everybody puts the word on a major-label record
2017
6ix9ine Gummo reaches No. 12 on the Billboard Hot 100, making the word national
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
Nationwide
Brooklyn (Flatbush, East New York, Canarsie), Queens, the Bronx; Newark and Paterson; North and West Philadelphia; Detroit · 2010s
Spoken by
Young Black and Afro-Caribbean New Yorkers; drill artists and their listeners across the Northeast; now general among US and UK rap audiences
$BLICKYThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Steady18 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
88/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
2008
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
■
"blickie, n.," Green Dictionary of Slang, ed. Jonathon Green (earliest citation 28 December 2008)
dictionary · database
■
"blick," Dictionary.com Slang Dictionary, 23 July 2018
reference · dated entry
■
Eminem feat. Danny Brown, Royce da 5 9 and Dej Loaf, "Detroit vs. Everybody," Shady XV, 2014
song · recorded
■
6ix9ine, "Gummo," 2017
song · recorded
■
+ Cite a sourceTony Thorne, "A Drill Dictionary," Language and Innovation, 19 April 2018 (contains no blick or blicky entry)
glossary · published
See also