Entry · catalog no. 9902
cool
/ /kuːl/ /KOOL
adjective · Nationwide — Kansas City / New York jazz origins · 1940s
✓ 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.
1930s-40s
Lester Young and the cool-school players model the bearing
1957
Miles Davis, Birth of the Cool, fixes it in the mainstream
present
Fully absorbed into global English
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
Nationwide / diaspora
Nationwide — Kansas City / New York jazz origins · 1940s
Spoken by
Jazz musicians, Kansas City & New York — then nationwide
$COOLThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Steady17 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
96/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1940
in the culture
Recorded here
2026
point of first record
Mainstream crossover
1957
search interest spikes
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
■
Birth of the Cool, Miles Davis — album · 1957
submitted
■
Lester Young interviews and oral histories, jazz press — documented usage · 1940s
submitted
■
+ Cite a sourceRobert Farris Thompson, "An Aesthetic of the Cool" — essay · 1973
submitted
See also