Entry · catalog no. 1253
chime
/ /tʃaɪm/ /CHYME
n. · Harlem, New York City · 1940s
✓ Verified
1.
An hour. One piece of a whole system of jive time-words — brights for days, dims for nights — that let a musician give the hour without saying the hour.
“We played four chimes straight and never once sat down.”
Origin & Attribution
Black Harlem, 1930s and 1940s, out of the working musician's day. Cab Calloway lists it in the Hepster's Dictionary alongside the rest of his time lexicon, and Dan Burley carries it in his Original Handbook of Harlem Jive the same year. It shows up in running prose, not just word lists: Mezz Mezzrow's Really the Blues has men forgetting their misery for a couple of chimes. Wentworth and Flexner picked it up for the Dictionary of American Slang in 1960, by which point it was already a record of something past.
1944
Listed by Calloway and by Dan Burley
1946
Used in prose in Mezzrow's Really the Blues
1960
Entered the Dictionary of American Slang
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
The Northeast
Harlem, New York City · 1940s
Spoken by
Harlem swing musicians
$CHIMEThe 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
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Citations & Sources
■
The New Cab Calloway's Hepster's Dictionary: Language of Jive
1944
■
Dan Burley, Original Handbook of Harlem Jive
1944
■
+ Cite a sourceMezz Mezzrow and Bernard Wolfe, Really the Blues
1946
See also