Entry · catalog no. 1211
chops
/ /tʃɑps/ /CHOPS
noun · Black jazz circles nationally — New Orleans, Kansas City, Chicago, New York · 1930s
✓ Verified
1.
In music, the trained strength and control a player brings to an instrument — first the lip and jaw of a horn player, later the hands of anyone.
“He'd been playing behind Sunday-morning choirs since he was twelve, so his chops were already set.”
2.
By extension, demonstrated skill in any line of work.
“She has the chops for the job; what she doesn't have is anybody in that building willing to say so.”
Origin & Attribution
English has used "chops" for the jaws since the 1500s, but the musical sense is Black American. Inside jazz the word narrowed to a wind or brass player's embouchure — the muscular setting of lip and jaw that makes a horn speak — and is attested in that sense by 1937. Over the next thirty years it widened past the horn section to mean a player's whole technical command, and from Black bandstands it passed into ordinary American English as a word for skill in any craft. It is regularly assumed to come from the cutting sense of "chop" or from the British "bust your chops"; it comes from the jaw, and the narrowing to embouchure happened inside Black jazz.
1937
Earliest citation for the embouchure sense, in the jazz magazine Tempo
1968
Sense has widened to overall musicianship, cited from the Black Voices anthology
1990
Fully general — used of academic writers in the Boston Phoenix
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
Nationwide / diaspora
Black jazz circles nationally — New Orleans, Kansas City, Chicago, New York · 1930s
Spoken by
Musicians, then general
$CHOPSThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Steady89 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
74/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1937
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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Atlanta, GA
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Memphis, TN
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Citations & Sources
■
Tempo (jazz magazine) — Aug 1937
Earliest Oxford English Dictionary citation for the musical sense
■
Abraham Chapman, ed. — Black Voices: An Anthology of Afro-American Literature — book · 1968
Cited for the widened sense: getting your chops together on the horn
■
+ Cite a sourceBoston Phoenix — newspaper · 27 Apr 1990
OED citation for the fully general sense
See also