Entry · catalog no. 1251
bree
/ /briː/ /BREE
n. · Harlem, New York City · 1940s
✓ Verified
1.
A girl; a young woman. Bandstand and street-corner shorthand from the jive register, used about the way a later generation would say shorty.
“Cat came through the Savoy with a bree on each arm.”
Origin & Attribution
Black Harlem, 1930s and 1940s — the jive vocabulary carried by Cab Calloway's orchestra and the dancers and hustlers around it. Calloway printed the word in his Hepster's Dictionary, a booklet he reissued in successive editions; the text reproduced everywhere online is the 1944 New Cab Calloway's Hepster's Dictionary, not the 1938 first edition, and the archive dates it to what can actually be seen. The word traveled outward from Harlem into carnival argot, where the Dictionary of American Underworld Lingo recorded it in 1950. The linguist David Dalby proposed a West African substrate for it in 1972; that proposal is interesting and unproven, and the archive does not record it as settled.
1944
Printed in The New Cab Calloway's Hepster's Dictionary
1950
Recorded in carnival argot, Dictionary of American Underworld Lingo
1972
David Dalby proposes a West African source
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
The Northeast
Harlem, New York City · 1940s
Spoken by
Harlem jive speakers; jazz musicians and dancers
$BREEThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Dormant82 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
12/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1944
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
Contribute your pronunciation
Citations & Sources
■
The New Cab Calloway's Hepster's Dictionary: Language of Jive
1944
■
Goldin et al., Dictionary of American Underworld Lingo
1950
■
+ Cite a sourceDavid Dalby, "The African Element in American English," in Rappin' and Stylin' Out
1972
See also