Entry · catalog no. 1185
butt sprung
/ /bʌt sprʌŋ/ /BUT sprung
adjective · Harlem as recorded; Black American speech broadly · 1940s
✓ Verified
1.
Of clothing: stretched, sagged, and permanently bagged in the rear from wear. A skirt or a pair of trousers goes butt sprung when the fabric has given up and holds the shape of the person instead of the shape of the cut. The word carries contempt — the garment has not merely aged, it has failed.
“That suit was sharp when he bought it and it is butt sprung now.”
2.
By extension, of furniture and of people: collapsed, flattened, with nothing left holding it up. A couch goes butt sprung the same way a pair of pants does, and a person comes home butt sprung when the day has taken the spring out of them.
“Come on in and sit down — mind that couch, it's butt sprung.”
Origin & Attribution
Black American speech, recorded in Harlem in 1942 by Zora Neale Hurston in the glossary appended to Story in Harlem Slang, where she defined it as a suit or a skirt out of shape in the rear. The image underneath it is mechanical: a sprung spring is one stretched past its return. It is one of the few words in that glossary that outlived the era it was collected in.
1942
Zora Neale Hurston records butt sprung in the glossary appended to Story in Harlem Slang, defining it as a suit or skirt out of shape in the rear
2013
Lexicographer Grant Barrett discusses the term on A Way with Words, identifies it as chiefly Black American, and records its extension to furniture and to exhaustion
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
Nationwide
Harlem as recorded; Black American speech broadly · 1940s
Spoken by
Black Americans; recorded in Harlem, still heard nationally and most reliably among older speakers
$BUTTSPThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Steady84 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
30/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1942
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.
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Citations & Sources
■
Zora Neale Hurston, Story in Harlem Slang, The American Mercury, July 1942, appended glossary
magazine · printed
■
A Way with Words, Butt-Sprung, 26 October 2013
radio · broadcast
■
+ Cite a sourceGreen's Dictionary of Slang, entry sprung, adj. — consulted and found to contain no butt-sprung sense
dictionary · online
See also