Entry · catalog no. 9902
cool
/ — /pending
adjective · Nationwide — Kansas City / New York jazz origins · 2026
✓ Verified
1.
Composed under pressure; excellent without effort. A whole ethic compressed into one syllable — to be cool is to keep your bearing when the room wants you rattled.
“He took the news cool, like he already knew.”
Origin & Attribution
Named and modeled by Black jazz musicians in the 1930s and 1940s — Lester Young above all, whose detached tone and unbothered carriage made "cool" a way of being before it was a word everyone borrowed. Miles Davis put it on a record sleeve in 1957 and the mainstream took it for a mood, not a discipline. Scholars trace the posture further back, to West African ideas of composure carried across the Middle Passage.
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
The Northeast
Nationwide — Kansas City / New York jazz origins · 2026
Spoken by
Nationwide — Kansas City / New York jazz origins
$COOLThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Rising0 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
2026
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
@bxgriot
The Bronx, NY
@phillyanne
Philadelphia, PA
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Citations & Sources
■
Birth of the Cool, Miles Davis — album · 1957
submitted
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Lester Young interviews and oral histories, jazz press — documented usage · 1940s
submitted
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+ Cite a sourceRobert Farris Thompson, "An Aesthetic of the Cool" — essay · 1973
submitted
See also