Entry · catalog no. 8343
bobos
/ /ˈboʊboʊz/ /BOH-bohz
noun · U.S. South / Mid-Atlantic (D.C., Atlanta) · 1970s
✓ Verified
1.
Cheap, generic, or knockoff sneakers — the kind sold in bulk bins at discount stores, with no real brand name or a cheap imitation of one (two stripes instead of Adidas' three, a fake star instead of a Converse patch). By extension, the word covers anything low-quality, off-brand, or fake, and in some Black communities it has been carried into carceral slang for the plain white slip-on shoes issued to people when they enter jail or prison with no money on their books.
“Man, don't come to school in them bobos, they'll clown you all day.”
Origin & Attribution
The base word traces to widespread American playground slang of the 1970s for no-name sneakers, reported independently from Virginia, Boston, Philadelphia, and South Florida. But it was Black urban vernacular — specifically D.C. and Atlanta hip-hop speech of the 1990s — that carried "bobos" into print as coded slang, most visibly when the Washington Post built the headline of its 1998 guide to hip-hop slang around the word. Mainstream slang trackers have often flattened "bobo" into a generic regional childhood word or confused it with the unrelated French "bourgeois-bohème" clipping, obscuring
1970s
Term for no-name, cheap sneakers spreads informally in playgrounds across the South and Mid-Atlantic.
1998
The Washington Post builds its hip-hop slang glossary headline around "bobos," documenting it as live Black vernacular from Atlanta to D.C.
2000s–2010s
Term extends in prison slang to describe the plain state-issued shoes given to inmates with no commissary funds.
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
The South
U.S. South / Mid-Atlantic (D.C., Atlanta) · 1970s
Spoken by
Black Southern and Mid-Atlantic communities, hip-hop speakers, and incarcerated populations
$BOBOSThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Steady47 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
28/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1979
in the culture
Recorded here
2026
point of first record
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
@nolakid
New Orleans, LA
@htxdri
Houston, TX
Contribute your pronunciation
Citations & Sources
■
guide to hip-hop slang from Atlanta to Washington
newspaper feature, Washington Post, 1998
■
BoBo's are the sneakers that are given to you in jail when you first enter
crowd-sourced slang entry, Urban Dictionary
■
+ Cite a sourcein the late 1970s, in the early 1980s, it meant shoes that were not of a popular brand name
radio segment, A Way with Words
See also