Entry · catalog no. 4175

cheese

/ /tʃiːz/ /CHEEZ

noun · American cities coast to coast; carried in the modern era by New York, Bay Area and Southern rap · 1850s

✓ Verified

Money.

“They out here chasing cheese seven days a week.”

Origin & Attribution

Cheese for money is older than nearly everyone who uses it. American print carries it from 1850, alongside bread and dough in the same family of food-for-cash metaphors. The widely repeated claim that it comes from government cheese — blocks handed out under federal dairy surplus programs in the 1980s — is folk etymology; the word was already a hundred and thirty years old when those trucks arrived. What is true, and what matters here, is that Black speakers kept the word alive when general American slang had largely let it go, and that Whodini, UGK and the rappers who followed put it back into national circulation in the 1980s and 1990s, along with the whole extended run of cheddar, Parmesan and Gouda that grew out of it.

1850

First recorded American use of cheese for money, in Ned Buntline's The G'hals of New York

1984

Whodini's "Friends" carries it into rap: couldn't trust her with cheese, let alone your keys

1994

The Notorious B.I.G.'s cheddar line is the one the OED credits with bringing the cheese family to its attention

Region of origin

West

Midwest

N.East

South

Nationwide / diaspora

American cities coast to coast; carried in the modern era by New York, Bay Area and Southern rap · 1850s

Spoken by

Black urban speakers — rappers, hustlers, and working people talking about pay

$CHEESEThe Record · cultural traction

▲ Steady

176 yrs

ahead of the mainstream

78/100

peak cultural energy

Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.

Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest

First used

1850

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

@auntiereg

Atlanta, GA

@deltasoul

Memphis, TN

Contribute your pronunciation

Citations & Sources

■

Green's Dictionary of Slang, "cheese, n.1"

historical slang dictionary

■

Whodini, "Friends," from Escape, 1984

rap single

■

Oxford English Dictionary blog, "When is cheddar not just cheese?"

dictionary blog

+ Cite a source